Document Type

Closed Project

Publication Date

Winter 2001

Instructor

Dragan Milosevic

Course Title

Communication and Team Building

Course Number

EMGT 522/622

Subjects

Communication in management -- Cross-cultural studies, Teams in the workplace -- Management, Communication in organizations, Intercultural communication

Abstract

Even though cross-cultural research on teams and group work has long been a social agenda, phenomenal growth in this direction has taken place in the last decade or so. The main motivating factors behind this has been: One diversification of workforce across the globe in general and the United States in particular and secondly the innovation of Internet has given tremendous boost to the globalization of businesses.

While the financial benefits of globalization has been realized in the short term, the real issue that has stemmed is that frequent interaction of diverse cultures in teams and group work has often resulted in ethnocentricity and sometimes observance of 'irrational behavior'. This has mainly· been due to the fact that global managers had almost no experience in cross-cultural skills.

This paper analyses the causes and effects of cross-cultural behaviors and their consequences on the performance of teamwork. The authors of this paper, having themselves worked in cross-cultural teams have added their experiences as a contribution towards research in this direction.

While cross-cultural teams bring diversity of opinion:, it has been observed that new ideas and unique solutions have stemmed out of such teams. The enhancement of cross-cultural team performance lies in understanding the intricacies of different cultures and using them to the advantage of the output of team. Global managers need to understand this and train themselves to deal with cross-cultural issues to the benefit of their business.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Comments

This project is only available to students, staff, and faculty of Portland State University

Persistent Identifier

http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/24812

Download

Share

COinS