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How does diversity affect team effectiveness
How does diversity affect team effectiveness
Pros and cons of diversity in teams
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Introduction
The evolution of globalization and the advancement of communication technology have increased the amount of cross cultural, virtual teams in existence in today’s business world. Cross cultural, virtual teams can leverage on the diverse experiences of its members to achieve good results even without the members meeting face to face.
Having good leadership of any project team is undoubtedly essential for the success of the team. It is thus imperative for virtual, cross cultural teams to be led properly and carefully so that their cultural diversity and virtual presence does not become a source of conflict and eventual failure.
Challenges posed by cultural diversity among team members
There are a number of challenges that a project leader is likely to face when leading a cross cultural team. Brett et al (2006) describes four major challenges namely; challenges with communication style, troubles with accents and fluency, differing responses to hierarchy and differences in decision making styles.
Cross cultural teams are quite unique when compared to traditional mono-cultural business teams. Mono-cultural team members share similar ideas on how to pass information. The team members of a mono-cultural team also interpret statements in a similar manner. Thus, mannerisms and words spoken are usually clearly understood with almost no ambiguity. This represents a possible advantage over cross cultural teams who have members with different communication styles. There is a tendency for people who come from a background where words and meanings are explicitly stated to misunderstand other members who like to imply meanings in their statements and vice versa. This misunderstanding can often lead to conflicts that can eventual...
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...1), pp.84-91, Business Source Premier [online].
http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=22671287&site=ehost-live. Accessed: 21st March, 2012.
Symons, J. & Stenzel, C. (2007) ‘Virtually borderless: an examination of culture in virtual teaming’, Journal of General Management, 32 (3), pp.1-17, Business Source Premier [online].
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Kossek, E.E, Lobel, S.A & Brown, J. (2005) ‘Human Resource Strategies to Manage Workforce Diversity: Examining the Business Case’. Available at: http://books.google.com.ng/books?hl=en&lr=&id=zUYHDw_detEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA53&dq=HR+strategies+in+designing+multicultural+teams&ots=GQEMrnrt3N&sig=jXJCo2ifZdrMBa4rC-8ruKFJClw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false Accessed: 27th March, 2012.
...he solution. Instead the solution is to develop richer and more complex processes of accomplishing the leadership tasks. Project Managers facing a complex challenge should focus on how to set direction for the team, create alignment between them, and generate their commitment and ignore how many people are, or are not, leaders. Making the accomplishment of the leadership tasks at the core of leadership raises new questions: What are the barriers or obstacles project managers should clears in order to set a clear direction, create an effective alignment, and generate a solid commitment? What resources exist in the organization that project managers could tap in for creating direction, alignment, and commitment as a complex challenge is being tackled? Answering these kind of questions can assist organizations avoid the traditional problems of distributed leadership
The main objective is to verify if face to face model can be implemented into a company that has already been using a virtual model. Teams can be made in different way and dealt in different ways. There are two important models now in days, a face to face and a virtual model.
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.
The management and development of leadership, trust, and accountability in culturally diverse virtual team members is an important business topic in today’s global economy.
Project managers working in a global environment must recognize the various ethnic and sociopolitical challenges involved.
Virtual team is also called as a Geographically Dispersed Team (GDT). A virtual team as a group of individuals who works independently across the world. In this modern day technology world we can communicate with the people very easily. Using the same technology virtual team would communicate and collaborate each other. Virtual team have corresponding abilities and are focused on a mainstream, they have related execution objectives, and they offer an approach to manage work for which they consider themselves commonly responsible. Organizations are allowed the virtual teams whomever have a best skills and they are the best people regardless of location. Virtual team have a unique characteristics and related to the management challenges. Virtual teams are utilizing the technology to communicate with the people and accomplish the company goals.
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.
Platt, L. (1999). Virtual Teaming: Where Is Everyone?. Journal for Quality & Participation, 22(5), 41. Retrieved from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3616/is_199909/ai_n8872660/
At the same time, virtual teams have some advantages. For instance, it’s easier to think
In today's global business environment, managing diversity in human resources has become a very important and crucial issue. Human resources management has a lot to deal with managing workers/employees from different countries and nationalities. Managing multinational human resources becomes an issue not only in the multinational corporations, having their offices or plants in different countries, but also in the domestic companies, with domestic workforce becoming more and more diverse each day. Creating an HR that has the ability to recruit and select the right people and the ability to effectively socialize and train employees will allow multinational companies to excel in all business aspects.
“Human beings have always functioned in face-to-face groups. While the use of teams is on the rise the Wall Street Journal reports that two-thirds of American companies employ them – the face to face aspect of normal working relationships is changing. Electronic communication and digital technologies give people a historically unprecedented ability to work together at a distance.” (Lipnack, J., & Stamps, J., 1997).
A virtual workforce is described as any team whose members are not all physically under the same roof, as long as the participants have complementary skills and knowledge that produce greater value when they work together than if they worked separately. A virtual team can be local, national, or global, with members from one firm or many. Teams can be made up of full-time...
Virtual teams uses a whole range of different ways to communicate, these characteristics are, Internet, e-mail, intranet, cellular phones, virtual chat-rooms, collaborative software such as video- and teleconferencing. ((Linda Arnison & Peter Miller_2002)
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.
Communication is the key to organization for these companies and leaders depend largely on its effectiveness. In one study of cross cultural communication, managers were asked to think of seven problems before the meeting to make the communication effective (Barriers of Cross Cultural Communication in Multinational Firms). But, how do people understand each other when they do not share the same culture? To answer this question we must first understand cross cultural management. This type of management focuses on the behavior of people working together as a group ...