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Executive Interviews: Interview with Gary David on Multicultural Teams
March 2007
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By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary
Gary David Associate Professor of Sociology at Bentley College. 
Of all the challenges outlined in the
previous question, which one do you
think has been the often observed
challenge and why do you think it
continues to be the biggest challenge?
Building and sustaining trust among
the team members is probably the
most difficult problem and remains a
major challenge. First, in the early
days of offshoring the negative
portrayal of this phenomenon in the
developed world affected the minds
and behavior of the onshore workers.
Many onshore workers saw
themselves not as team members but
temporary workers who are training
people who will take their jobs. It is
very difficult to build trust in this
environment.
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Second, the
organization policy of allocating nonchallenging
and routine work to
offshore sites created an Us versus
Them orientation among the sites,
making building and sustaining of
trust hard. Third, we know that in
collocated teams trust is built over
time as team members interact
informally and get to knoweach other.
Organizations do not know how to
emulate informal interactions in a
virtualworkplace. This is whatmakes
virtual workplace communities a
major challenge for organizations. Apart from the challenges, how do
the other complicating factors
influence the multicultural team
members' group behavior?
During our research we were told
many times by the onshore managers
that the Indian workers do not push
and do not show initiative. The crosscultural
training manual noted that
Indian workers are meek and do not
seek leadership. However, when we
visited the Indian sites of our research
firm, we discovered that the average
age of the Indianworker is 25with 1.2
years of experiencewith the firm, and
that these Indian workers have to
interface with US workers where the
average age is 45 and over 10 years of
experience with the firm or the
system. This leads to the question: Is
the root cause for the behavior of the
Indian workers a national
characteristics or a new employee
syndrome? We listened to several conference
calls between the US team leader and
the Indian team. We observed that
when the US lead was a person of
Indian origin, the Indian team was
more vocal and comfortable in
pushing back things and deadlines
that were not doable. This suggests to
us that it iswrong to associate behavior
to simplified national culture models.
One has to look at the context. In
organizations that are building new offshore
sites and engaging with vendors,
the relative age and experience of the
distributed personnel needs to be
considered when trying to achieve an
integrated GVT. People worry about being called
bigots or racists when they speak about
diversity issues in theworkplace? What
do you think is the best possibleway to
neutralize such perceptions and derive
the benefits of multicultural teams
diversity strength?
The most important factor is the
general organizational message
regarding the importance of diverse
members of the workforce, whatever
the basis of that diversity. At the
same time, programs that try to
increase sensitivity of diversity can
result in increase of perceived
differences and social distance
between groups. As we mentioned
earlier the traditional cross-cultural
training is creating an environment
where stereotyping is given
legitimation, and stereotyping in its
worst form leads to bigotry and
racism. Our approach to neutralizing
racism and bigotry is to build and
sustain trust through the
establishment of an intragroup
(versus an intergroup) orientation.
This is what we refer to as the
Pronoun Progression: moving from
Us/Them (intergroup) to You/I
(interpersonal) to We (intragroup
or collective). Ultimately, the social
distance has to be reduced, social
networks expanded and social
capital increased. Does nationality of company
ownership evoke dysfunctional
behavior amongst multicultural team
members? Take the case of a software
company from India. When this
company forms a multicultural teams
to its offshore projects, the team
members from US (assume an
outsourcing backlash against Indian
BPO companies knocking off their
native jobs) might not give their best,
resulting in low productivity and
unsatisfactory execution of the project.
We have seen examples where
workers collaborate despite this
backlash because they see each other
as having commonalities and
similarities. So, despite the fact that
an American might be training his or
her Indian replacement, he works
with that person because the person
is not seen as responsible for the
changes in the organization and
economy. Rather, the Indian person is
a worker just like the American
worker. Also, it is important to understand
the difference between the Indian IT
subcontractor firms with the
globalization strategy of US firms. In
general the Indian IT subcontractor
firms' employees are of Indian origin.
Whereas, the US firms are establishing
work site globally and their employees
are truly multicultural. Therefore, the
problems of the Indian IT
subcontractor firms are different from
those of US firms. As a consequence,
their approaches are different. Indian
IT firms diffuse the cultural trust, time
zone and communications problems
by placing 20%of the Indian staff at the
onshore customer site. This team
bridges the gaps between the offshore
workers and the US clients. The US
firms do have the luxury of bridge
teams. Their view is that the team
members are distributed globally and
the teammust find away to effectively
collaborate. As Indian IT firms start
purchasing other IT companies across
national boundaries, they will face the
same problems thatUS firms are facing
in building an effective global
workforce.
1.
Team Building Case Study
2. ICMR
Case Collection
3.
Case Study Volumes
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