When a major international software developer needed to produce a new product quickly, the project manager assembled a team of employees from India and the United States. From the start the team members could not agree on a delivery date for the product. The Americans thought the work could be done in two to three weeks; the Indians predicted it would take two to three months. As time went on, the Indian team members proved reluctant to report setbacks in the production process, which the American team members would find out about only when work was due to be passed to them. Such conflicts, of course, may affect any team, but in this case they arose from cultural differences. As tensions mounted, conflict over delivery dates and feedback became personal, disrupting team members’ communication about even mundane issues. The project manager decided he had to intervene—with the result that both the American and the Indian team members came to rely on him for direction regarding minute operational details that the team should have been able to handle itself. The manager became so bogged down by quotidian issues that the project careened hopelessly off even the most pessimistic schedule—and the team never learned to work together effectively.
Managing Multicultural Teams
Multicultural teams offer a number of advantages to international firms, including deep knowledge of different product markets, culturally sensitive customer service, and 24-hour work rotations. But those advantages may be outweighed by problems stemming from cultural differences, which can seriously impair the effectiveness of a team or even bring it to a stalemate. How can managers best cope with culture-based challenges?
The authors conducted in-depth interviews with managers and members of multicultural teams from all over the world. Drawing on their extensive research on dispute resolution and teamwork and those interviews, they identify four problem categories that can create barriers to a team’s success: direct versus indirect communication, trouble with accents and fluency, differing attitudes toward hierarchy and authority, and conflicting norms for decision making. If a manager—or a team member—can pinpoint the root cause of the problem, he or she is likelier to select an appropriate strategy for solving it.
The most successful teams and managers, the authors found, dealt with multicultural challenges in one of four ways: adaptation (acknowledging cultural gaps openly and working around them), structural intervention (changing the shape or makeup of the team), managerial intervention (setting norms early or bringing in a higher-level manager), and exit (removing a team member when other options have failed). Which strategy is best depends on the particular circumstances—and each has potential complications. In general, though, managers who intervene early and set norms; teams and managers who try to engage everyone on the team; and teams that can see challenges as stemming from culture, not personality, succeed in solving culture-based problems with good humor and creativity. They are the likeliest to harvest the benefits inherent in multicultural teams.