Managing Multicultural Team

Introduction

For article review, our group has selected “Managing Multicultural Teams” by Jeanne Brett, Kristin Behfar, and Mary C. Kern from Harvard Business Review ( November 2006).

Jeanne Brett is the DeWitt W. Buchanan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations and is the Director of the Kellogg School’s Dispute Resolution Research Center. Professor Brett’s research is in the areas of cross cultural negotiations, the resolution of disputes, and the performance of multicultural teams. Kristin Behfar is an associate professor at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia, studies culture and team decision processes. Her research interests include conflict management in teams, leadership in groups and teams, team performance and performance assessment, and group decision-making. Mary C. Kern is an assistant professor at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College in New York. Her research is in the areas of negotiation and decision making.

In this article, the authors discuss about multicultural teams often generate frustrating management dilemmas. Cultural diversity can create substantial obstacles to effective teamwork, but these may be subtle and hard to recognize until significant damage has already been done. They interviewed managers and members of multicultural teams from all over the world. These interviews led them to conclude that the wrong kind of managerial intervention may force out valuable members, create resistance and resulting in poor team performance.

Summary

First of all, the challenge in managing multicultural teams effectively is to identify underlying cultural causes of conflict, to intervene in ways that both get the team back on track and enable its members to deal with future challenges themselves.

From the article, the authors explained that cultural challenges are manageable if managers and team members choose the right strategy and avoid imposing single culture based approaches on multicultural circumstances. People tend to assume that challenges on multicultural teams arise from differing styles of communication. There are four categories that can create barriers to a team’s ultimate success include direct versus indirect communication, trouble with accents and fluency, differing attitudes toward hierarchy and authority, and conflicting norms for decision making.

Communication in Western cultures is typically direct and explicit. Negotiators that use indirect communication may have to infer preferences and priorities from changes or the lack of them in the other party’s settlement proposal. Misunderstandings or deep frustration may occur because of nonnative speakers’ accents, lack of fluency, or problems with usage or translation. A challenge inherent in multicultural teamwork is that by design, teams have a rather flat