Pros And Cons Of Multicultural Teams

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Today, globalization is getting more and more common. For example, from 2006 to 2016, percent of international students at UCSD grew from 3% to %19. Under such a circumstance, multicultural teams will likely be built. In a multicultural team, people with different nationalities and cultures will work together, and different cultural competencies can bring both shared preferences and conflict. Therefore, it’s important for leaders of multicultural teams to take advantage of cultural differences and deal with conflict at the same time to maximize productivity. To show the potential pros and cons of multicultural teams, I build a hypothetical team consist of me, a typical Japanese and a typical American according to Erin Meyer’s cultural map.…show more content…
On the other side, when high-context Japanese gets low-context assignments, he might waste time on redundant work. Since I am neutral, I can understand both high-context and low-context assignments in some case, so I can work as a translator to translate communications for them. However, this is not a long-term solution for two reasons: I might fail to understand very high-context or low-context communications, and also I will spend too much time and energy on translation instead of work. To really get rid of communication problems, we three need to build up the consensus among us. In high-context cultures, communication doesn’t need to be too precise because people have agreed on expressions. When someone says something, the others can read between lines naturally because this is the communication system they know. For my team, it’s inevitable that there will be communication problems at the beginning because we are diverse. After we have problems, each of us should learn from it, figure out what was the true meaning behind those expressions and modify our way of expressing and understanding. Erin Meyer asks leaders to “adjust, and readjust, your position”, and I think each member of a team should adjust to different cultures. During the process of learning, American will get to know about high-context communication, and Japanese will learn about low-context communication. This will not only help them work on my team, but also such
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