Culturally diverse teams provide the opportunity for a greater number of cross-cultural interactions and can present a number of benefits for teams including increased innovation, creativity and problem solving capabilities. At the same time, however, they also provide opportunity for greater miscommunication and misunderstanding, which can impede the social and task-related functions of the team. Consequently, cultural diversity itself will not generate benefits in teams,
rather it is learning to work with cultural diversity effectively that will allow a team to realize these benefits Managing in intercultural work settings calls for developing a set of competencies that address these circumstances. Briefly, these are:
Dissimilarity openness – A person’s level of openness to perceived dissimilarity will dictate whether or not they incorporate differences into work processes in a positive way. Individuals high on the dimension of openness view differences as positive, individuals low on this dimension view differences as negative.
Emotion management skills – Good emotion management skills is required in order to reduce the impact of emotional conflict within multicultural teams. Individuals with sound emotion management skills deal with stressful situations in a calmer way avoiding counterproductive activities.
Intercultural communication competence – For intercultural communication to be effective, individuals need to have an understanding of the cultures involved to effectively encode and decode messages. Cultural knowledge may be the basis for developing communication competencies.
Tolerance for ambiguity – Individuals with tolerance for ambiguity are able to make decisions and deal with uncertainties without the need to obtain more information and are more open to new information about themselves and others. Individuals with low tolerance to ambiguity tend to base judgments of people on their first impressions. The higher one’s tolerance for ambiguity, the more comfortable they will feel in a situation that they are not familiar with.
Cultural understanding – Cultural understanding incorporates concepts such as sensitivity and empathy for cultural difference and flexibility towards cultural differences. It provides a foundation to trust between team members as it strengthens communication effectiveness between them. In order to diverse teams to be inclusive and effective, team members need to develop an understanding of the cultural backgrounds of other team members.
Information management skills – Individuals from culturally diverse backgrounds may have different ways of processing the information that they receive, different cognitive styles – the ways we structure our beliefs and attitudes and respond to incoming information. The “cognitive consequences of diversity” refers to the effects diversity might have on the group ability to process information, perceive and interpret stimuli, and make decisions.
Conflict management skills – Success of the team may depend on the way in which they manage disagreements. Knowledge of conflict resolution strategies by team members may be critical to the success of culturally heterogeneous groups.
Self-management skills – Sound self-management skills are likely to improve the interaction of diverse group. Self-monitoring theory suggests that high self-monitors tend to develop relationships at work with distinctly different people.
Source: Loyd, S., Hartel, Ch. E.J
Required Readings:
• Managing Across Cultures: Read Chapter 3: Cultural Environments, and Chapter 4: Organizational Environments
• Loyd, S., Hartel, Ch. E.J., The intercultural competencies
required for inclusive and effective culturally diverse work teams,
Working paper 28/03 May 2003, Monash University.
Assignment:
Identify your own cultural orientation. Begin with Hofstede’s cultural dimensions (found at: https://geert-hofstede.com/national-culture.html) and place yourself in the spectrums given. Then compare your individual ratings with the average ratings in three other countries (one from Asia, one from Europe and one from Africa). Discuss how these cultural differences can be minimized or controlled in culturally diversified working environment.
