Managing multicultural teams

Abstract

The art of managing multicultural teams esteems for project human resource management. According to the Project Management Institue managing a project team can be described as "Manage Project Team is the process of tracking team member performance, providing feedback, resolving issues, and managing team changes to optimize project performance."

When a manager is working with a diverse team there will be some differences in cultural beliefs, values and assumptions in which he or she has to consider. The manager needs to be aware of what artifacts and basic assumptions that influences the team members, and which cultural issues may have an negative impact of a given project if it is not dealt with timely and with correct approach.

Working with a multicultural team can empower creativity and innovation and has advantages in problem identification and generating alternatives for given problems; the team will only be effective, if they solve any given problems of internal integration. One of the biggest issues a manager can encounter when working with a multicultural team is neglecting the cultural differences of the team members. Two team members, who have different national backgrounds may not have the same social relationship nor time perception; one may have a high emphasis on punctuality and specific deadlines whereas another may have a less strict perception of what is timely. It is therefore not only important that the manager is aware of the multicultural differences but the team members should also understand the cultural differences and learn how to bridge between the different cultures to minimize blindspots.

A diverse set of tools can be applied to understand and bridge between different cultures in a project team and one of them is MBI. This tool was invented by Maznevski and DiStefano, which was used to identify cultural differences and how to communicate and bridge between these differences. The key idea for this tool is to use the cultural differences to bridge and create understanding between the different cultures, which should empower the quality of both decision making and idea generation for the team. . This article will focus on the impact of cross-cultural teams have on projects, how and why they should be managed and what tools that can be applied to optimize team dynamics and performance.

Definitions

The definition of what culture is not completely agreed upon hence different scholars have different definitions. The scholars do have some characteristics of a culture they can agree upon .

• An interrelated system of dimensions
• Sets of ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, behaving and evaluating
• Provides a reference frame for actions and decisions
• More or less shared at the group level
• Learnt through socialisation

These characteristics shows that the cultural tow is shared between groups and they are unique ways of behaving, thinking feeling etc. The definition of multicultural teams may not be as transparent as one would assume at first glance. It can easily be interpreted as only being the national differences between team members and their beliefs, values and artifacts. When talking about different cultures in the project team, it could also imply the different spheres of organizational cultures e.g. financial department, HR, R&D, marketing, engineering etc.

The specific project management view used in managing different cultures is called project human resource management ,but is usually referred to as human resource management. Human resource management deals people as a resource and their resource can be defined as their skill set, knowledge, characteristics etc. Human resources can be difficult to manage as they are not tangible and a manager will therefore always have some uncertainty in the behaviour or actions of his team members.