Business Case Studies, Executive Interviews, Jeanne M Brett on Multicultural Teams

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Executive Interviews: Interview with Jeanne M Brett on Multicultural Teams
March 2007 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary


Jeanne M Brett
DeWitt W Buchanan, Jr.,
Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University


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  • Of these four challenges, which one do you think has been the oftenobserved challenge and why do you think it continues to be the biggest challenge?
    Different teams experience different challenges.

  • Apart from these four reasons / challenges, do you think anything else might be contributing to a stalemate in multicultural teams? For instance, do you believe, factors like age, experience, and educational background, marital status etc. would influence the multicultural team members' group behavior?

    Multicultural experience no doubt influences team effectiveness. Teams with more members who exhibit cultural intelligence are more likely to engage in team processes that preserve cultural differences. Cultural intelligence is an individual's ability to deal effectively in situations characterized by cultural diversity (Earley & Ang, 2003). There is not enough research yet to know why some people have higher CQ than others.

  • † You have listed four strategies for managing these challenges. Can you elaborate on each one of them?

    Four Strategies
    The most successful teams and managers we Interviewed used four strategies for dealing with these challenges: adaptation (acknowledging cultural gaps openly and working around them), structural intervention (changing the shape of the team), managerial intervention (setting norms early or bringing in a higher-level manager), and exit (removing a team member when other options have failed). There is no one right way to deal with a particular kind of multicultural problem; identifying the type of challenge is only the first step. The more crucial step is assessing the circumstances or "enabling situational conditions" under which the team is working. For example, does the project allow any flexibility for change, or do deadlines make that impossible? Are there additional resources available that might be tapped? Is the team permanent or temporary? Does the team's manager have the autonomy to make a decision about changing the team in some way? Once the situational conditions have been analyzed, the team's leader can identify an appropriate response. (See the exhibit Identifying the Right Strategy)

    Adaptation
    Some teams find ways to work with or around the challenges they face, adapting practices or attitudes without making changes to the group's membership or assignments. Adaptation works when team Interview 5 members are willing to acknowledge and name their cultural differences and to assume responsibility for figuring out how to live with them. It's often the best possible approach to a problem, because it typically involves less managerial time than other strategies; and because team members participate in solving the problem themselves, they learn from the process. When team members have this mind-set, they can be creative about protecting their own substantive differences while acceding to the processes of others.

    Structural Intervention
    A structural intervention is a deliberate reorganization or reassignment designed to reduce interpersonal friction or to remove a source of conflict for one or more groups. This approach can be extremely effective when obvious subgroups demarcate the team (for example, headquarters versus national subsidiaries) or if team members are proud, defensive, threatened, or clinging to negative stereotypes of one another.

    Another structural intervention might be to create smaller working groups of mixed cultures or mixed corporate identities in order to get an information that is not forthcoming from the team as a whole. The manager of the team that was evaluating retail opportunities in Japan used this approach. When she realized that the female Japanese consultants would not participate if the group got large, or if their male superior was present, she broke the team up into smaller groups to try to solve problems. She used this technique repeatedly and made a point of changing the subgroups' membership each time so that team members got to know and respect everyone else on the team.

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