Question

"INDIVIDUAL" RESEARCH AND REFLECTION REPORT

"In today's world with the increasing emphasis on globalization and acknowledging the ever increasing pace of change and international competition business leaders rely on "international teams." Properly formed and structured these teams have very specific knowledge, skills and abilities (ksa's) and understand how business is conducted around the world. Of course, in establishing and managing such teams professional business managers must consider many new issues/problems from effective team communication to cultural differences and how these influence team objectives, plans, processes and ultimate success."

After doing on-line or library research in this subject area and considering your own thoughts and opinions write a research paper (with proper referencing) on the various cultural factors that influence teams working in global organizations, including not- for-profit or NGO's. Discuss the importance of communication and identify methods to aid in communication understanding and project success.

Report is to be from 7 to 8 pages.

Answer 1

Multicultural teams face a myriad of challenges not faced by single-culture teams. Cultural differences within teams have the potential to pose barriers with respect to communication, relationship building, cooperation, and trust, influencing team members’ views of the group and both their own and others’ participation in it. Greater cultural diversity within the team is expected to result in more pronounced differences in attitudes and behaviors.

Factors Affecting Multinational Team Performance

Societal Factors:

Societal factors include cultural standards, subculture and social identity as well as national
culture. For a better understanding of what we mean by societal factors, we provide the definitions of concepts implied.

National Culture:

Every nation or every culture has its own beliefs, values which define the shoulds and the oughts of life.

Subculture and Social Identity:

People within a national culture might differ in age, religion, race, locality,or other subgroup. Thus, individuals from same nation bring different behavioral expectations to a team. In other words, members of a team represent both the national cultures that they come from and many other subcultures and identities.

Cultural Standards:

Processes of perception, thought, evaluation and action that for the majority of the members of a particular culture are regarded, for themselves and for others, as normal, typical and obligatory. Some of the examples of cultural standards are; punctuality, meeting deadlines, negotiation styles, collectivism or individualism etc.

Institutional Factors:

Implies the sector of work (development, education, military etc.), industry (high tech,manufacturing etc.) and also the differences between profit and non-profit, private and public, national and international organizations etc.

Organizational Factors:

Include organizational culture (sets of norms developed around organizations according to their purpose), organizational structure (structure that help create teams and promote teamwork) and organizational arrangements (e.g. compensation system, performance management system, training and development system etc.).

Team Factors:

Team factors include size, type and goal of the team.

Informational Diversity:

Informational diversity is attributed to the differences in knowledge base and perspectives.

Cultural Intelligence (CQ) of members:

Cultural intelligence (from now on referred as CQ) is defined as individuals ability to “be skilled and flexible about understanding a culture, learning more about it with his/her ongoing interactions with it, and gradually reshaping his/her thinking to be more sympathetic to the culture and his/her behaviour to be more skilled and appropriate when interacting with others from the culture”.

Education:

Includes both educational background of team members and in-service training and education offered by companies during employment.

Language:

Implies the mother language of the team members which was traditionally seen as part of national culture. Although culture and language are closely related, we argue that the effects of language and culture on multinational team performance are different. Whereas cultural diversity may have a positive or negative impact, language diversity is more related to communication between team members.

Management:

Management and leadership of multicultural teams involves effectively and creatively dealing with a variety of challenges that emerge as people from different cultural backgrounds interact with each other to accomplish the team task.

Team Culture:

Members of multinational teams must actively cope with cultural differences in order to bridge cultural boundaries. One such mechanism is the formation of a team culture, which is considered as another factor effecting team performance in this paper.

Team Climate:

Team climate is defined as shared perceptions of the kinds of behaviours, practices, and procedures that are supported within a team. Team Climate implies trust, commitment,cohesion and efficacy.

The importance of communication in an organization can be summarized as follows:

1. Communication promotes motivation by informing and clarifying the employees about the task to be done, the manner they are performing the task, and how to improve their performance if it is not up to the mark.
2. Communication is a source of information to the organizational members for decision-making process as it helps identifying and assessing alternative course of actions.
3. Communication also plays a crucial role in altering individual’s attitudes, i.e., a well informed individual will have better attitude than a less-informed individual. Organizational magazines, journals, meetings and various other forms of oral and written communication help in moulding employee’s attitudes.
4. Communication also helps in socializing. In todays life the only presence of another individual fosters communication. It is also said that one cannot survive without communication.
5. As discussed earlier, communication also assists in controlling process. It helps controlling organizational member’s behaviour in various ways. There are various levels of hierarchy and certain principles and guidelines that employees must follow in an organization. They must comply with organizational policies, perform their job role efficiently and communicate any work problem and grievance to their superiors. Thus, communication helps in controlling function of management.

Methods to aid in communication understanding and project success.

6 Effective Methods to Improve Project Communication

• Set project expectations. The first step to establish an effective project communication plan is to set project expectations from the first day with both team members and stakeholders. ...
• Build a strong team culture. ...
• Run effective meetings. ...
• Ask questions. ...
• Take advantage of collaborative tools. ...
• Focus on nonverbal communication.