Introduction
Organisations that operate globally ‘’rely on multicultural teams to perform word-related activities’’. With the international trade growing and globalisation increasing rapidly, one of the main challenges that organisation encounters is how to increase and manage workforce diversity. Majority of the organisations depend on teams that have different attributes to each other. Businesses utilize the deeper knowledge of multicultural teams, and their variety of skills that will take the organisation forward. However, Individuals bring their culture differences to the team which sometimes causes conflict or it divides the team. “Differences of values may become points of discord, and violence may erupt, as people defend their way
…show more content…
According to Greetz (1973) “saw culture as the way groups of people solve problems and reconcile dilemmas,” whereas Seelye (1993) “defined culture as patterns of everyday life that enables individuals to relate their place under the sun”. As Hofstede specified five major dimensions “of culture all which are embedded in people’s values and standards”.
It is mandatory that the human resources department understands “the culture of the employees in their organisation” so that they can fulfil the needs of their employees. If organisations do not have a greater understanding, the culture of their employees, then it would be very complicated for the team to accomplish both the objectives and the aims of the company.
Multicultural teams can be a team that has cultural differences, which has been merged together in order to exploit their knowledge, skills and experience for a particular project. A multicultural team can “lead to increased creativity and efficiency”. According to Marquardt and Horvath (2001) defined “Multicultural teams as a task oriented groups consisting of people different nationalities and cultures”.
Power Distance
Power distance is the degree of “equality or inequality between people in the society and indicates the extent to which less powerful expect and accept that power is distributed unequally”. Power distance also illustrates to which member of staff acknowledge that superiors
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.
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.
HR Professionals must understand the business and culture for which they serve and the HR strategy must be aligned to this.
Diversity acknowledge that people are differ in many ways, such as age, gender, social status, disability, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity and culture (Kossek, Lobel & Brown, 2005). Nowadays, diversity has increasingly become the most valuable aspect of HRM areas. Develop countries such as Australia and New Zealand hold multicultural workforce as one of the most important dimension of diversity, where there are a large number of international migrants with different cultural backgrounds (Shen, Chanda, D’Netto & Monga, 2009). Studies from McLeod, Lobel and Cox (1996) and Wilson & Iles (1999) point out that a diverse workforce has a better-quality solution to brainstorming task, display more cooperative behaviour, and can raise organizational efficiency, effectiveness and profitability. Hence, utilization of diversity allows organization to increase the organization cooperative behaviour and competitive advantage (Cassell 1996). However, in groups where people from different cultural and ethnic background are working together, differences may occur in management styles, attitude towards hierarchy, approaches to group work, and ways of expressing
When people from the same schools, socioeconomic backgrounds, and political learnings work together in a team. They are to work together and work towards the same. In table 1, Adler (2002) shown that a monoculture team will only be able to produce and maintain certain level of productivity and efficiency in an organization when being compared to their multicultural counterparts
Diversity is an important component of team structure and forming. Planned or unplanned, diversity is likely an attribute in the overall team composition. Team diversity presents its challenges as teams are commonly assembled with members with different experiences, skills, talents and expertise (Smith, 2014). Organizational diversity has become an increasingly noticeable concern recently due to the modernization of the business culture. Virtualization, decentralization, globalization and a business requirement to create and innovate has forced organizations to explore more diverse teams to produce results. The variability will prove to be challenging and may trigger conflict that must be overcome internally by the team to move forward. This paper examines the importance of properly structuring and forming diverse teams to achieve high performance and success.
Multicultural teams have become more common in our organizations, and contemporary international management literature has identified that the management of multicultural teams is an
Broad definitions seek insertion, but do not allow for identification of the differences between functional and social diversity. These differences make the organization confused and leave it in unclear state, as a result most diversity management program adopted fails due to lack of reliability in the definition of diversity. The impacts of diversity in the workplace can be both positive or negative. Some negative effects include dysfunctional conflicts, lost productivity, and difficulty to achieve synergy in group settings. Positive effects include a strong knowledge and skills base created by a variety of cultural experiences, an in-house resource of cultural trainers and informers, and greater readiness to expand the business international and globally. For the most part, the effects of cultural diversity in the workplace depend on how well they are being managed by the organizational leaders. With the right strategic planning and commitment, top management can enhance the positive effects and reduce the unfavorable effects of cultural diversity in the workplace. After analyzing many research work and business report on this topic, we found out that diversity have no absolute effect and can only be judged by the way it’s implemented. It need joint and integrated effort starting from the top management to the non-managerial levels, supervisors should lead employees the right way, coordinate and stay available to any conflict or diversity problem. After doing all your best you can eventually judge the diversity plan and evaluate how successful was it, because no generalization can be
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.
Power Distance: In western cultures hierarchy is established for convenience, where superiors are always accessible and managers are able to rely on employees and teams for their expertise. Consultation is expected for both managers and employees and information to be shared on regular basis. Communication is often informal, direct and participative.
Power/Distance (PD), “refers to the degree of inequality that exists- and is accepted- among people with and without power. A high PD score indicates that society accepts an unequal distribution of power, and that people understand “their place” in the system. Low PD means that power is shared and well dispersed.” (www.mindtools.com) As an example from the article, Myers goes on to say, “there were basically four levels: VP, director, manager, and worker bee. You only talked to people at your level.” SK Telecom boasted that
Members of the multicultural team must remember four items for success. The first is different cultures interpret the same situation differently and the will deal with them differently also. Understand everyone will not have the same understanding of the situation as you do. Second, “Make sure everyone knows what the team’s goals are and how the team had decided to achieve them. Everyone must also know their roles, responsibilities, and the conditions when flexibility is warranted or encouraged.” (Smith and Lindgren, 2007). Third, an understanding must be met on how the information will be handled in the team and how to communicate it. What is polite and what is rude to all. Lastly, keep an open mind. Different cultures have different behavioral rules, thus having an impact on their decision making, risk perception, communication and social interactions.
Multiculturism is a philosophy which appreciates ethnic diversity within a society and that encourages people to learn from the contribution of those of diverse ethnic backgrounds. Though culture is seen as ‘‘a richly rewarding area to pursue,’’ it is none- theless ‘‘a woefully complex maddeningly dynamic phenomenon’’ (Faure & Rubin, 1993, p. 228)(5). “Unity in diversity” is the perfect principle based on which any organisation succeeds. It is known fact that employees from various cultures contribute more effectively to organisations success than organisation working with single culture employees. But the authors of the article “Managing Multicultural Teams” (henceforth referred as core article) are of the opinion that cultural
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 &
Hofstede’s Power distance Index measures the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. This represents inequality (more versus less), but defined from below, not from above. It suggests that a society’s level of inequality is endorsed by the followers as much as by the leaders.