After Ophélie’s article
about “The Canadian Mosaic in the workplace”, I decided to use the academic
article published in the Hard Business Review in November 2006, called “Managing
Multicultural Teams” to compare the management of cultural issues in
companies to the management of a multicultural city.
When a company has an
international presence, workers may come from different countries and,
therefore, have different cultural backgrounds. Cultural differences within a
same team can lead to conflicts and serious obstacles which impacts the
progress of the shared project. This more and more common situation could be
compared to the integration of foreigners within a country where the local
culture is different from theirs.
In their article “Managing Multicultural Teams”, Jeanne
Brett, Kristin Behfar and Mary C. Kern identify three different steps to follow
to resolve conflicts within a multicultural team.
The first phase is to identify
the cause of the conflict. According to the authors’ researches 4 categories
can create barriers to a team’s success.
The second step is to assess
the situational conditions under which the team is working and the last one is
to analyze the right strategy to apply. Four types of intervention to resolve
conflicts, explained in this paper, are used by successful teams and manager
when it comes to dealing with problems.
In the following blog
article, I will analyze “Managing
Multicultural Teams” while comparing the process identified to the
management of a multicultural city.
Step 1: Identify the cause of the conflict
The four obstacles presented by Jeanne Brett, Kristin Behfar and Mary
C. Kern, in their article “Managing
Multicultural Teams” are cultural differences that can cause destructive
conflicts within a team.
The first barrier called “Direct versus indirect communication”
is about communication style. Westerners tend to use direct and explicit
communication whereas Easterners would use indirect communication, “where
meaning is embedded in the way the message is presented”. When a Westerner and
an Easterner have a conversation together, the Easterner can understand the
direct communication style used by the Westerner but this last one will have
difficulties understanding the indirect communication of the Easterner. Direct
communication can sometimes give the feeling that boundaries have been violated
for an indirect communication user. Communication issues “create barriers to effective
teamwork by reducing information sharing [and] creating interpersonal
conflict.”
The second barrier
identified in the paper is “Trouble with
accent and fluency”. Indeed, when the official language of a company is not
some employees’ mother tongue, express themselves may be more difficult for
them than for the others. Their accent and poor speaking level can also make
them difficult to understand which will lead to misunderstandings. Frustration
will be created too as the difficulty communicating knowledge of nonfluent team
members will make them feel undervalued. If not expressed properly, the rest of
the team won’t recognize and utilize their expertise.
Those first two barriers
identified in the article show how much communication is important to avoid
conflict between people from different cultural backgrounds. This confirms what
has been analyzed so far on this blog through the diverse articles about Seoul’s
and Paris’ facilities that offer various translations so foreign visitors can
understand information that is communicated.
The two other barriers
identified by this paper are “Differing
attitudes toward hierarchy and authority” and “Conflicting norms for decision making”. Both of these barriers are
specifically linked to the corporate world, they can hardly be compared to the
daily life in a specific city. However what can be retained is the solution
offered to avoid conflict when it comes to decision making: “The best solution
seems to be to make minor concessions on process – to learn to adjust to and
even respect another approach.”
Step 2: Assess situational conditions
Before identifying the right
strategy to fix the problem, the context and conditions in which the team is
working have to be assessed. What needs to be identified, for example, is the
team manager’s autonomy on changing the composition of the team; what
additional resources are available and could be added to the project; what is
the level of flexibility of the team for change; is the team permanent or
temporary; what is the project’s deadline; etc.
All these factors need to be
considered when the type of intervention is selected. Exactly like, situational
conditions are analyzed by decision makers when it comes to choosing the right
migration policies.
Step 3: Identify the right strategy to apply
The first strategy that
teams going through a conflict should try is “adaptation”. Adaptation is when team members acknowledge cultural
gaps openly and work around them by adapting their practices or attitudes
without changing the group membership or assignment. It is considered as “the
ideal strategy because the team works effectively to solve its own problem with
minimal input from management”. To accommodate all members and reach higher
quality decisions, the team tries to “merge” the cultures in its process. “This
approach, called fusion, is getting serious attention from political scientists
and from government officials dealing with multicultural populations that want
to protect their cultures rather than integrate or assimilate.” If you remember
right, in a previous article called “Business management and city management
towards foreign culture” posted in July on this blog, we’ve seen that marketers
were using adaptation strategies to accommodate their customers that were
mostly from Latin America. The adaptation strategy in a multicultural team is
not that different from acculturation orientations that we described few months
ago. The key stays the same: acknowledge and name cultural differences and develop
tool or attitudes to live with them.
The second strategy
presented in this paper is “structural
intervention.” “A structural intervention is a deliberate reorganization or
re-assignment designed to reduce interpersonal friction or to remove a source
of conflict” within a group. This intervention may result, depending on the
problem, in hiring someone from outside the company to lead meetings so people
feel more at ease than with their boss or create smaller working groups within
the team when some members are too shy to speak in front of a large group or
higher management.
To fix a specific issue, “managerial intervention” is sometimes
required. For example, when dealing with a problem related to the differing
attitudes toward hierarchy and authority among cultures. Indeed, in some
culture hierarchy is strictly adhered to when in others hierarchy in companies
is pretty flat. In countries paying careful attention to status, a managerial
intervention may be necessary to respect the counterpart culture and resolve
the issue. Moreover, in every multicultural teams, “managerial intervention to
set norms early in a team’s life can really help the team start out with
effective processes.”
The “exit” strategy has to be considered as a last resort solution. It happens
when a member is removed from the team, either voluntarily or after a request
from management. This situation usually happens when emotions run high and
professional differences switch to personal differences.
This blog article tries to
analyze “Managing Multicultural Teams”,
an academic article published in the Harvard Business review in November 2006. We
have seen that three steps are needed to resolve a conflict happening in a
multicultural group. Whether this kind of problems happens within a company or
in the daily life of a city, this process could apply to both situations.
Indeed, when cultural conflicts happen, the first phase decision makers should
do is identify the cause. We now know that they usually come from
communication, attitude toward authority and decision making process.
Situational conditions, like the flexibility of change of local policies, etc.
also need to be assessed before choosing the right strategy that will apply to
the situation.
Of course, as we’ve seen
earlier, adaptation is necessary and seems to be the best solution, but
sometimes, when it’s not only about cultural differences, you’ll have adapt to
the style of whoever you’re dealing with. But that’s another issue…
One of the main factors that
clearly appear once again, like in other articles posted on this blog, is
communication. It seems to be the basis of cultural integration and adaptation.
This is why next month we will study intercultural communication and how it
could apply to the management of a multicultural city.
References:
Harvard Business Review. Brett, J., Behfar, K. &
Kern, M.C. November 2006. Managing
Multicultural Teams.
