multicultural team Essay

This in turn can increase the creativity and innovation within organizations. As well, individuals from diverse backgrounds are able to provide companies with insight into foreign business practices, translation assistance, and offer detailed information to assist in market penetration. A diverse working team can also improve decision making by providing different perspectives on problems. Individuals embrace working alongside other cultures, as it is a personal learning process that will prove useful in the future.

The culture of team is weak, as there are no established norms and values or ground rules. As such, there was a discrepancy in the development of the team during the norming stage, as discussed previously. The team also engaged in a cultural clash in terms of industry areas, country/ethnic differences, and subcultures. The MGI founders related to a creative and artistic industry, while the students were business focused. The cultural differences manifested themselves in terms of language and expectations. And finally, within the subgroups were individual subcultures, which lead to a difference in values, roles, purposes, and goals especially when disagreements between these subcultures occurred (Hofstede, 1998). Multicultural teams can be more

Those that go into the business world quickly recognize that each work environment they find themselves in can be total different from another. This can especially be said even of environments within the United States, from region to region. There is definitely a disparity of workplace environments from country to country. Not only can culture drive a varied atmosphere, but the diversity of the personnel making up that environment can equally create a challenge that a leader must be prepared to manage. Recognizing that special care needs to be placed on communication and perception skills is crucial in our present professional domain. Managers of today need to employee tools from the psychological and sociological field to be successful. Having a deep understanding in the differences in culture and diversity in the workplace is critical, especially when debating about accepting a position overseas or assigning an employee to an embedded position abroad. With a broad knowledge of cultural differences and diversity, success as a manager and the stability of a positive work environment can be achieved and maintained without unnecessary effort and focus.

The rise of multinational companies and increased global diversification by even small companies has resulted in people of diverse backgrounds and cultures working together in the same office or for the same organization. Conflict in such situations is predictable, but understanding the diversity issues can help companies implement programs designed to keep conflict at a minimum and to take full advantage of the many benefits which such diversity brings to an organization. Key to understanding how diversity is managed in multinational organizations is understanding the concept of corporate culture (which defines organizations), diversity programs and their use to minimize conflict among employees, and the unique problems that employees

The positive impact of cultural diversity on group behavior can contribute creativity to a high-performance team. Membership diversity offers a rich pool of information, talent, and varied perspectives that can help improve team problem solving and increase creativity (Hunt, J., Osborn, R., Schermerhorn, J., 2005). Cultural diversity contributes various group input and group dynamics to the team. These two factors are essential in the high performance of a team. Cultural diversity can develop a high-performance team by allowing the diverse potentials of a team to operate. The negative impact of cultural diversity on group behavior can develop numerous of conflicts between team members. Conflicting interaction can limit or decrease the effectiveness and efficiency of productivity. There should be an awareness of the diverse culture values in order to prevent these conflicts.

The very differences that give a team its potential for high performance can sometimes make it difficult for members to develop a sense of team identity. Why? Differing assumptions, cultural backgrounds, and ways of working and thinking can lead to misunderstandings or tensions among members. For example, on a research and development team comprising members from three different nations, people from a country in which formality is valued might bristle if their counterparts from another nation address them in casual terms.

I would like to pursue managing a multicultural team. I would like to do this because I feel like managing a multicultural team will teach me a lot about my own communication skills and break down barriers that I have about other cultures. I feel it will also help me with my challenges as a manager. I know it would be very challenging, however, I’m willing to take a chance. I want to address differences to overcome differences.

The evolution of globalization and the advancement of communication technology have increased the amount of cross cultural, virtual teams in existence in today’s business world. Cross cultural, virtual teams can leverage on the diverse experiences of its members to achieve good results even without the members meeting face to face.

With the progressive globalization of the workforce, businesses are more and more finding themselves working more often with culturally diverse employees and business partners, an experience that has proven to be rewarding and yet challenging. In fact, the impact of cultural diversity on team productivity and organizational culture is not clear and yet doing so is becoming more the norm than it is the exception. While in some cases, research suggests that teams characterized by demographic heterogeneity have advantages over teams who are not demographically diverse (e.g. added ideas, approaches, perspectives), other research indicates that the multicultural aspect of a team creates potential for added conflict. Still further research offers that conflict itself is not a problem as long as it is constructively handled. To at least some extent, the notion of what constitutes ‘‘constructive’’ handling is subjective and culturally sensitive. For example, the same silence or increase in personal space in one context or culture may be seen as respectful and constructive, the same might be viewed as non-participatory and disrespectful in another. Beyond very broad descriptors, the contributors to effectiveness within a multicultural team appear to be contextual and subjective. To this end, we focus on the Chinese culture and what the research reveals in terms of findings and accompanying recommendations with regard to cross-cultural teams and management.

Organizations have been becoming increasingly diverse in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality. This diversity brings substantial potential benefits such as better decision making, greater creativity and innovation, and more successful marketing to different types of customers. But, increasing cultural differences within a workforce also bring potential costs in higher turnovers, interpersonal conflicts, and communicational breakdowns. The utilities of diversity training and the essential managerial skills required for effectively managing diversity will also be discussed.

Diversity in culture and demographic characteristics can be a negative impact or be one of the team's greatest strengths, depending on how the team as a whole functions and applies these different “routes to success”. A group can become a high performing team by understanding how cultural and demographic differences influence group behavior. The groups must realize that they can benefit from their diversity to their advantage and into a high performance team.

Team The Impact of Team Cultural Intelligence and Cultural Heterogeneity on Team Shared Values. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 44(6), 941-962.

To dissolve this particular problem, top management need to play their role to educate middle managers on how to handle multicultural teams without discrimination. They can also create awareness on what multicultural teams would bring compare to monoculture teams can contribute. Besides, top management can provide all the necessary information to cater the needs to manage multicultural team in global organization.

To investigate the moderating affect of cultural diversity on the relationship between gender diversity and team outcomes.

Many opportunities are associated with a culturally diverse workplace and global expansion may have potential to provide just such a diverse work group. Cross-culturalism in business can provide leaders and employees with a wonderful opportunity to work with people from different backgrounds and cultures. In addition, “the more opportunities for business leaders to interact with people from different cultures, the more likely they will be to have positive attitudes from different cultures and identify, learn and apply diverse culturally-appropriate business behaviors” (Caligiuri & Tarique, 2012, p. 614). Culturally diverse environments offer a multitude of benefits including “the variety of perspectives, skills and personal attributes” (Matveeve & Nelson, 2004, p. 254). Moreover, multicultural teams have potential to “generate more ideas of higher quality in brainstorming tasks” (Matveeve &