Multicultural Teams

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.

Some of the qualities that leaders need to be successful in a cultural difference environment are technology savvy, building partnership and alliance. Leaders need to know how to build accountability into their systems with regard to their managers taking responsibility for creating a diverse and inclusive work environment. A successful leader should know how identify when cultural difference is needed. When client is diverse, it means that diversity is needed in our workforce so that we can learn and know more about the clients so we can make employees more effectives addressing client’s needs. Building partnership and alliance with other companies to look for prospect hires, leaders should have the character to know people and identify their culture differences, values, belief to create mutual independence.

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

When leading an established or developing team it is important to recognise any challenges that may occur and deal with it as soon as possible to try and prevent the issue escalating.

Decided on how to implement changes and addressing issues and re-planning implementation plans. Also co-ordinating activities of every member of the team, collating work products into the whole or overall goal can be a big challenge to the team and the leader or manager of the team.

When developing a conflict resolution it helps to know techniques such as, problem solving, avoidance, compromising, and communication. This will help your team members and create a system for redressing grievances, if they cannot solve their problems on their own. Then it will be necessary to arrange for the manager to conduct a meeting on this subject.

The selection of a team leader is of key decision that can have a great impact on the overall success of a team. A good team leader should be able to build and maintain team morale, instilling confidence and trusting in other team members allowing them to work together to achieve the teams goals (Llopis, 2014). The ability to understand the stages of a team and provide the guidance to all members is essential. The stages of forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning (Abudi, 2010) are a helpful framework for recognizing patterns during team conversations and the understanding that team development may not always be linear. The aptitude to walk the team through these stages and ensuring they understand the development of the team and why things are happening in certain ways is an important part of the self evaluation process. Having ways to identify when certain behavioral patterns are occurring and a way to then cause changes to the team behavior can help the team maximize its productivity.

One of the four strategies proposed by Brett et al. (2006) for solving conflicts in multicultural teams is adaptation. The other three - exit, structural and managerial intervention are inapplicable in our case. Adaptation is the most convenient approach that our team has unconsciously been conducting and will continue developing in the future in order to achieve the common goal of the team. We decided that for us it would be to aim for high performance. We came up with our own definition of that goal and it is being able to complete a task on time while successfully implementing our skills and learning as much as possible in the process. We already had a turbulent situation in the team because of insensitive comments which made an impact on some of the team members. We attributed them to cultural differences rather than personal ones and that is the approach we want to keep in the future. A possible way on how to achieve high performance in our team could be described by the following statement from the article On Life and

Our team has experience in diverse multicultural students. Our teams works across Indonesia and Australia education systems (New South Wales and Victoria). We have a good sample size to measure if the immersive technology can lift academic grades. Furthermore we can follow the students journey after they finish from

Multicultural teams have become more common in our organizations, and contemporary international management literature has identified that the management of multicultural teams is an

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.

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.

Cross cultural team members also face a challenge of having to understand that other team members possibly have a different idea of how to treat their bosses. Drawing from the example of my job team at work, I noticed that my American team members do not really run their ideas through our team leader before taking actions. However, my Turkish boss does not like this as he comes from a culture where everything a subordinate does should be run through the boss for approval. This had caused strains in the team’s effectiveness in the past; until my American team members adapted to fit our team leader’s wishes.

Teams can scale up their cultural tolerance and understanding of differences by proactively working towards achieving this understanding. Such efforts would include focus groups for controlled interaction and avoiding the tendency to socialize only in homogeneous groups.

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 &