Advantages Of Managing A Multicultural Team

Managing a multicultural team

Introduction:

A multicultural team can be explained as a team of people from different cultural backgrounds working together especially in an organisation to achieve a common objective. This team of people mark the most valuable resources to any organisation so it is important to manage these human resources accordingly. Managing a multicultural team is one of the most challenging responsibilities for all managers or project leaders. In a multicultural team comprising of people from various cultures there can be various discrepancies like same words having different meaning in different cultures, power distance, personal space, language problem etc. So the team leader should have good leadership skill and sufficient

There tends to be a chance of ‘group think’ in homogenous groups where an idea is accepted because all other team members accepts it and in spite of thinking an alternative course of action the group member believes on the basic assumptions that the idea is good. But in a multicultural team all members have different views about an issue and they have wider experience and reach in solving a problem, they bring out alternate solutions and ideas for a common aspect from various perspectives because different cultures have different view towards world.

Another advantage of multicultural teams is their responsiveness and adaptiveness. A diverse team is more flexible to adapt changes because it manages diversity within the team. Ability to adapt changes is crucial, and then only the organisation can succeed in adverse situations by taking quick decisions. Change is essential to stay in business. The divergent thinking within a multicultural team enhances flexibility of the organisation to adapt changes.

Global level of learning and sharing is possible in a diverse team because each team member may have different opinions and views. Each member is bought up in different cultures so the team members can study about different cultures and being part of this team increases their global reach and enhances their thought

Interpersonal conflicts

Western cultures follow typically direct and explicit communication that is they don’t want to go deeper into the context of speech or the characteristics of speaker to understand or interrupt the meaning of what is said because for them the meaning of the word is direct on the surface. But in many other cultures the meaning will be embedded that is implicit communication and it’s the duty of the listener to interpret the meaning according to the context.

For example in America responding ‘yes’ in a conversation means they agree to what the speaker is saying but for Japanese people responding yes means they are listening to what the speaker is talking about. This difference between implicit and explicit communication posses serious threat and can often create misunderstanding among people within a multicultural team. Some cultures point out the mistakes very directly that they don’t consider the feelings of the other whereas some other cultures use many other indirect ways to convey their dislike or flaws. Mexican culture tends people to be more humble so they put everything in a question format with open ended form but in American culture they shoot their opinions straight forward. So if the Mexican expresses his opinion in a question format the American tends to believe that he is unaware of the topic. This can lead to conflicts among team