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Theories of cross cultural management
Cultural diversity in an organization
Cultural diversity in an organization
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Advantages and disadvantages of working in a bi-cultural managerial team. // Bi-culturals are individuals who have deeply internalized two cultural schemas. A cultural schema is a set of knowledge about values, norms, and beliefs for a given culture. Bi-culturals are an increasing workforce demographic, and hence a growing part of multicultural teams. Their innate skills that result from being bicultural may help solve central problems in multicultural teams, including managing conflicts and boundary spanning across cultures. In today’s globalized world, multicultural teams accomplish a significant proportion of organizational work. Multicultural teams are formed because they improve organizational effectiveness in the global business environment. As such, multicultural teams offer huge potential to organizations. The most critical and practical challenge multicultural teams face is managing conflicts across members’ national cultural boundaries. Other cultural challenges in multicultural teams include dealing with coordination and control issues, maintaining communication richness, and developing and maintaining team cohesiveness. For multicultural teams to be effective, members must learn to address the challenges that arise from team members’ differing nationalities and cultural backgrounds. For instance, lets take into consideration this …show more content…
A well-managed bi-cultural team is proven to be a success because when people from different backgrounds bring their own unique cultural experiences to the situations they face in their companies and this broader perspective of viewpoints tends to allow for a better ultimate resolution, however if those teams are not managed properly, and if the size of those teams are not managed, and the individuals are not catered to, the cons may outweigh the
Being bi-cultural has placed me in a perplexing portal between two separate worlds, with their own unique ideology, thinking, traditions and
Hyun, Jane. “Leadership Principles for Capitalizing on Culturally Diverse Teams: The Bamboo Ceiling Revisited.” Leader to Leader. 16 Mar. 2012: 14-19. Web. 2 Apr. 2014 < http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ltl.20017/abstract >
Cultural diversity is an essential piece of the team-building puzzle. As stated earlier, a heterogeneous team usually equals a successful team. A culturally diverse team brings the obvious cultural differences in language, dress and traditions to the table. In addition, less tangible characteristic such as moral values are equally, if not more important. These different methodologies and teachings help influence the team's direction. Persons of Western culture will have a different set of beliefs and methodologies from those of Middle Eastern or Eastern ethnicity. When team members take the time to learn and understand each culture's moral value, the result is a strong team foundation. High performance teams take and incorporate these cultural differences and use these different beliefs and values to attain the team goal.
In today’s ever-changing and highly integrated world, corporations have a growing need to hire and maintain an exceedingly diverse and multicultural workforce. With globalization, multinational corporations have a great opportunity to work with people from different cultures and with a diverse pool of skills. However, there is a major cost of working in a foreign culture. Several problems arise when managing a culturally diverse workforce; management needs to solve them. Understanding different cultures improves employees’ efficiency and productivity. However, many issues in cross-cultural analysis arise because of the lack of understanding of other cultures and at times about that very culture we live in. This can result in confusion. This confusion results in distortions about the very cultures we are trying to understand. The paper will highlight several theoretical and practical cross-cultural management issues recommend solutions.
As said above, to manage a multicultural teams, learning about the cultural differences and using them for advantage is important before it causing issues in/between the teams. From literature it is found that a project manager should deal this multicultural environment in 2 ways. Firstly, it is important for himself to get ready with some cultural awareness to handle the challenges [9]. Second, then he should know the possible strategies and methods to implement in/between teams to handle the challenges due to cultural diversity [7].
Understanding the impact of globalization on cross-culture communication is imperative for organizations seeking to create a competitive advantage in the global market. Regional, ethnic, and religious cultures account for differences with countries; ethnic and religious groups often transcend political country borders. These groups form minorities at the crossroads between the dominant culture of the nation and their own traditional group culture (Hofstede, et., al, 2010). An effective global leader, when crossing country and cultural borders a transformation should occur asking ourselves, who we are and how we see ourselves. Global businesses must understand how to communicate with employees and customers from different cultures in order to fulfill the organization’s mission and build value for stakeholders (McCall & Hollenbeck, 2002). To achieve goals and avoid cultural misunderstandings, leaders should and need to be culturally sensitive and promote creativity and motivation through flexible leadership. Cross-culture leaders should be culturally sensitive and promote creativity and motivation through flexible
The journal article is titled “Creating Hybrid Team Cultures: An Empirical Test of Transnational Team Functioning” authored by, P. Christopher Earley and Elaine Mosakowski from Indiana and Purdue University respectively. The journal provides information on a study that was carried out to measure the impact of heterogeneity and performance of an international organization. The journal tests the relationship between heterogeneity of a team specifically on the issues of cultural differences and the effectiveness of such a team. The main argument is that transnational teams once they have successfully overcome the challenges of heterogeneity will create a certain culture that is unique to them through which effective evaluation and performance is achieved. This type of a culture that the team attains is referred to as a hybrid culture (Earley & Masokwoski, 2000). The journal therefore contains three studies that test the relationship between team heterogeneity and effectiveness.
There are several factors that are important if a culturally diverse business team is to flourish and realize its vast potential. Di Stefano and Maznevski (2000) claim that there are three imperative steps to achieving multicultural team success; namely, mapping the team; where the team members need to clearly understand their cultural differences in how they work and view success. This is often led by the team leader. Next, the team must bridge, that is, to communicate with one another, bearing in mind their cultural differences. Finally, the team must integrate, meaning that they bring together these differences and leverage on them to succeed.
Recent years, organisation are much more relay on diversity teams to developing products, making decisions and also gain the business success (When and how), therefore diversity team are becoming a very important element for the organisations. In USA, diversity usually refer to demographic characteristics such as age, gender, and ethnicity, however, diversity is not only refer to demographics, it also means the diversity in psychological characteristics like skills, personality, abilities, and education backgrounds (book diversity). Although team diversity leads to some benefits like the positive organisational cooperation, share the knowledge and experience, it can also leads some problems to the organisation, such as the tension between members
The cross cultural differences could be one of the difficult tasks to deal with. Managers need to operate with a vast variety of employees who posses distinguished beliefs, values and attitudes, Most of the times, seeing things different than us. For a successful manager, it is essential to have positive thinking and keeping in mind that there is a solution to every issue (The Wisest, 2011).
Cultural differences plays a huge role in growing and sustaining a business. It helps companies understand different cultures to provide greater services not only to their customers but a greater work environment for their employees. Some aspects include gender, race, nationality, religion and age group. (Seymen 2006) proposed that values and morals each individual hold have influences on behaviours and ideas in different scenarios. According to (Bateman and Snell 2012), there are many advantages towards the organisation in terms of better market connections, improved international competition, multiplicity points of view and a better team performance.
Sonderberg, A-M & N Holden. (2002), Rethinking cross cultural management in a globalizing business world' International Journal of Cross Culture Management 2(1): 103-121
To be successful in such type of new environment, managers must learn to value and respect cultural styles and ways of behaving those differ from our styles. They should be able to relate the cultural diversified workforce to the growth of organization. Managing workforce diversity should be considered an opportunity to venture into new markets. By valuing and managing diverse workforce, it is possible to enhance creativity, flexibility, and rapid response to change. Managers, to utilize the potential of diverse workforce, must look through in every business function like recruitment, selection, placement, development, succession planning, performance appraisal and
Mosakowski, E. (2000). “Creating Hybrid Team Cultures: An Empirical Test of Transnational Team Functioning”. Academy of Management Journal, pp: 26 – 49.
The combination of the best things in the world, the crystallization of culture and wisdom of people all over the world—that is a multicultural society, full of different languages, clothing, customs, and ways of thinking. To work together and learn from each other in order to make the world better, which is what the world should look like. Indeed, some people argue that there are lots of conflicts within multicultural societies like discrimination and terrorists. However, those are definitely occasional, and the mainstreams of multicultural societies are cooperation, integration, and development as a whole.