Managing multicultural teams in a company & managing a multicultural city

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.