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January 04, 2006
Cross Cultural Teams
Teaming is one of the two disciplines for achieving performance in small groups. In addition to keeping groups small, the team discipline revolves around needed skills, shared sense of purpose, goals and how to get along and work together, and mutual accountability -- all of which make the findings from Grovewell must reading for folks in cross cultural teams.
We are all human -- we bring with us beliefs and behaviors that reflect 'how we do things around here'. Increasingly, more and more of us absorb and practice such values in organizations. Still, the forces of national and ethnic culture remain the starting point because of family, because we 'grow up' in contexts heavily influenced by those cultural dimensions. The shift from place to organization going on around the globe holds both promise and peril -- but surely one potential advantage comes from blending the best of various cultures into 'how we do things around here' in our organizations. Teams are powerful crucibles for making this happen because they are small thick we's with an orientation toward performance -- toward some objective purpose that brings us together meaningfully.
As the Grovewell research shows, achieving performance requires small cross-cultural groups using the team discipline to grapple with how to get the best from values that are seemingly at odds, such as:
1. Individualism versus group orientation
2. Hierarchical versus democratic distribution of power
3. Content-focused versus context-focused communication style
4. Formality versus informality
5. Punctuality versus flexible sense of time
6. Task and goal orientation versus relationship orientation
7. Deductive versus inductive reasoning
8. Holistic versus linear thinking
9. Confrontation versus diplomacy/face-saving
10. Short-term versus long-term viewpoint
11. Competition versus cooperation
12. Loyalty to particular people versus obedience to universal rules
13. Self-determination versus acceptance of fate/circumstance
14. Religious versus secular worldview
15. Permissiveness versus strict rules/regulations
16. Pragmatic flexibility versus adherence to detailed plans
17. Achieved versus ascribed status
18. Change as positive versus tradition as revered
19. Youth orientation versus age veneration
20. Male dominance versus gender equality
21. Rigid class structure versus social mobility
22. Action/doing versus contentment with being
Much turns on the attitudes with which these questions are approached, especially how best to respect differences while finding a shared path to performance that matters. Folks who jump straight to 'good versus bad' step into unpromising territory. In contrast, those who take the time and make the effort to understand nonjudgementally will build the initial respect and trust required for more difficult choices about the best path to performance.
The Grovewell piece speaks specifically to cross-cultural teams. Over thirty years of experience with small groups, however, suggests to me that several of the items listed apply just as much to folks coming from different organizational cultures (e.g. in a post-merger integration team) and different functional/expertise cultures (e.g. marketing versus engineering).
