Key Factors of Multicultural Team supervision & Leadership
Posted on | January 1, 2012 | Comments Off
Multicultural teams have come to be very common in new years. With cross border mobility becoming much easier the amount of people exciting from one country to another has grown significantly. This has also led to more people from dissimilar cultural and ethnic backgrounds intermarrying. Their children could be born and grow up in dissimilar countries and have hybrid cultural identities. Globalization and the advances in communication and communication technology have reduced trade barriers and increased interaction among people.
Is global homogeneity a feasible and desirable vision? Philosophically this would be very questionable. This would be immediately equated with suppression of differences and diversity, which are inalienable human rights. It can be argued that it would destroy cultures and diminish creativity. There are sufficient instances in human history e.g., the fate of the Native Americans or the Conquistador actions in South America, where one culture has by force exterminated other cultures. Then there are scores of other examples where aspects of cultures have blended straight through interaction e.g., India and the United States. Today, though genocides happen under our very eyes e.g., in the Balkans or in some parts of Africa, the prevailing models of cultures influencing others is mutual interaction, where there is ample room for retaining one’s own cultural identity. As of the 2000 census, “minorities” have come to be the majority people in six of the eight largest metropolitan areas in the United States. Thus living with and managing diversity has come to be the central theme of this century.
Many studies have in fact shown that diversity in human capital unquestionably leads to increased creativity and efficiency in many cases. Studies have also shown that the failure to successfully combine diverse workforces has negative implications for organizational performance. This is most publicly expressed in legal actions, such as new discrimination suits against multinational corporations such as Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Xerox.
The skills needed for managing with people from diverse backgrounds at work or exterior the workplace can be very dissimilar because in the workplace we are in our work roles and there are many external constraints to our behavior. Many people unquestionably spend more time awake with their colleagues than with their spouse and children. So any problems arising in this area will definitely spill over onto the secret life.
Looking carefully into the factors that influence multicultural team leadership or management, we can identify five factors that control at team levels:
National culture
Corporate culture of the organisation
Nature of the manufactures or functional culture (coal mine, marketing, accounting)
Stage of team development
Personal attributes
National Culture – There are ample theories and much study into how national cultures influence team behavior. Ger Hofstede’s Culture’s Consequences (1980) and Cultures and Organizations (1991) are two examples. National culture has many dimensions like orientation to time, style of communication, personal space, competitiveness and worldview. Ordinarily we are dealing also with stereotypes and cultural biases here. Regional and personal life sense or character traits can override these ascribed ‘national’ culture traits. In real life this means that an Italian team member can be a shy, quite man or a German can be hopeless with timetables.
Corporate Culture – Corporate culture is very closely linked to the functional culture and it is a supervene of a historical process where the founder and successive leaders have left their marks. A large multinational organisation is bound to have a more structured, hierarchic and bureaucratic advent to running its affairs while an Internet web fabricate business with 5 young creative artists would be an entirely dissimilar environment.
Nature of the manufactures – Coal miners, web designers and international bankers would seem to come from dissimilar worlds. Dress, language, etiquette, unwritten codes of behavior, appropriate custom and skills needed on the job vary to a great extent in dissimilar industries. It is of vital significance that the industry, the organisation or the environment allows team members to display a sense of pride in one’s pro identity.
Stage of Team amelioration – If the team is just recently formed with no history or experience, the rules of the game have to be learn by everyone. If the team has a history of performing efficiently, new entrants can rely on established custom and older members to teach them the skills required. The stage of amelioration of the team member also plays a great role here. If the team is in the formation stage, the rules of the game are still being negotiated and people are learning their own roles. The ‘veteran’ team member has carved a secure role for himself while the entrant has to struggle.
Personal Attributes – Last but not least is all the other factors like personality, competence profile, the individual’s own life experience, expectations of rewards, acknowledgment and pleasure from working in the team as well as former history of team working.
The first three factors are static factors, which means that their characteristics cannot be unquestionably changed by private action. Team members or even the whole team cannot change the national culture. Individuals, teams and organisations have to learn to adapt to them. In fact the efficiency of the team is directly correlated to how well this adaptation has been achieved. But intervention can greatly influence the last two factors of Stages of Team amelioration and Personal Attributes. A team can accelerate its improve from formation stage to the stage of maturity and an private can change personal attributes by acquiring new competences.
Superior sustainable team doing can be achieved only if team members learn to take into catalogue dimensions of organizational culture and those of national culture like orientation to time, style of communication, personal space, competitiveness and worldview. Only when these have been successfully adapted to their working practices to reflect the team members’ background realities can teams unquestionably see the added value that multicultural teams bring.
Key Factors of Multicultural Team supervision & Leadership