the influential factors that support the success of a multicultural team
Introduction
In this assignment, the focus is drawn to the learning and development in Organizational Behavior context by analyzing one’s own experience in being a part of virtual team management and my experience as learning. The assignment report has also mentioned the difficulties faced along with recommendations and a proper conclusion.
Discussion
In order to find out the influential factors that support the success of a multicultural team that is virtual in nature, we decided to conduct a project work on organizational behavior. When working in a multicultural group, I have experienced a lot of new things along with many new things to learn in addition to that my own interpersonal development in that environment. I was able to learn the different dimensions of cultures by mixing up with distinct people with their culture, the use of new technology, the pattern of instructions in between the various team members in different cultures, the impact on the cultural factors, behavior related to communications, also the ways of changing time relation, trust, approaches in problem-solving, dispute resolution of the team and so on. Let’s discuss all of the aspects that I have learned from this multicultural virtual teamwork one by one in detail.
Culture
I have learned on how the culture of nationalism different based on the four factors they are Power distance, individualism-collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and on masculinity and facility of the national culture. Among all these criteria, the masculinity and the feminity is the most researched element in the model, among others.
Critical factors that impact the success of a virtual team
While working in the virtual team, I came across some problematic areas regarding cross-vdifferences, accessibility, and communication, which has finally given rise to the Virtual team. Thus depending on the task of our team, the interactions that we have during discussions, a valued or practice-based difference cropped up, in our case, the result was potentially positive. Still, there are other cases in which the result can be potentially negative or even neutral. According to me some of the negative or problematic aspects of virtual multicultural teamwork would be isolation, dispute, the slow or the frustration nature of the communication start is done on online. There are also some distracting elements in the computers or the few availabilities of different social cues. As for the multicultural group experiences, I think each member is able to contribute their own unique experience and talent in the team, which is a right way of learning and developing the knowledge on a particular subject such as Organizational behavior or nay such topics. Thus when each member of the team was able to use these individual differences in the culture towards Synergy, rather than making it become a cause of divisiveness, it human resources and the team grow stronger. The cultural difference that was there between each member of the virtual team made the collaborative work of the task and interaction a bit more complicated for all of us to understand. Hence it can also be added as a negative point of a virtual multicultural group discussion (Arslan et al. 202).
Communication
I think this is one of the key elements that cause the hindrance in understanding the other team members’ point of view in the interaction among the virtual team members. Even the CMC has also limited itself in the level of communication because of the lack of prosodic features and other paralinguistic measures (Kubovcikova et al. 2016). These prosodic features or the paralinguistic aspects such as intonation, pitch, stress are emphasized in our group discussions and contrasted in the verbal communication and in the lack of verbal communication which includes gestures, or body languages or the facial expressions and that usually a part of the face to face discussion but it was missing from our virtual team task. From the learning I have so far, I understood it is not useful to use only the CMC as the only option of communication for the collaborative task. When we were in Virtual teams, we spend a lot of our time in communication as the amount of conversation that is required for the online environment is comparatively more than in any face to face group communications. So I have understood that the computer-mediated groups or the virtual team groups are further difficult to communicate in comparison to face to face groups and thus take a long process to reach the decisions. Even I believe the pattern of the reason for the virtual type of communication is much complex, and the decisions usually perceived are usually deep and reflective, which not the case for face to face settings is. I have seen and learned from this group that the people from various cultures have different kinds of emotion expression patterns. The motivational processes such as how it is being controlled, how it gets recognized, who it is appealing to, or how rewarding or punishing the employee behavior is all are parts of the cultural values. As the motivational processes and tools, along with its values, are reflected directly in certain cultures, such as the different cultural backgrounds responses to different factors of motivation (Leontev, 2019).
Language
Language is our primary communication tool when it comes to the virtual team communication system. However, language difference is the major barrier in terms of communication when it comes to cross-cultural communications. I have learned that it is important as the culture includes both the norms and codes of social communications in the community that are gained by means of language. Moreover, I have also understood how the space, time, body gestures, along with language, also differs from one culture to the other. I have seen how some cultures prefer to keep a distance or maintain a wider personal space at the time of face to face interaction, but for some cultures, bodily contact also plays a part. Even the grammar, vocabulary and meaning can also differ widely around the world. Thus I can point out from my experience that the language plays a vital role in influencing high-performance teamwork among such multicultural virtual teams (Holtbrügge and Engelhard, 2016).
Media
To work collaboratively in multicultural teams, the medium of communication can act as a hindrance. The usage of the media can also differ from one culture to the other. So I believe there should be a reason to trust on the statement that connections do exist among the different cultures. There might be slow acceptance of technologies in certain cultures or different usage percentages in different cultures of the same techniques, and the consequences of the failures can be dangerous (Ratasuk and Charoensukmongkol, 2019). For example, in my virtual team, an only very person from different culture processes the information differently, even categories various kinds of information in the form of higher priorities and lower priorities, and also possess different degrees of satisfaction for the same information. When a multicultural virtual team adopts a media which is new, then the members of the virtual team may face problems initially to understand the best usage of the media. Along with that, two main criteria, such as the social proximity and the cultural diversity, also plays an important role in the selection of the media. Along with the said reasons, the technical characteristics can also lead to a problematic situation for the media (Shahbaz and Arshad, 2016).
Dimension of culture
From the virtual team, I have known that the relationship between the CMC and influencers of the three dimensions of the model known as Hofstede’s model is the avoidance of uncertainty, the individualism and collectivism, and power distance. I have learned the uncertainty dimensions, and the countries that are located in the substantial uncertainty endure tend to use less media as the media is not adequately suited for the uncertainty reduction as face to face. It can also be said that the cultures where the managers and the workers have been separated by a longer power distance, the support of the CMC group is usually significantly high. But different other researches have shown that the level of CMC has no such effect on the power distance (Baker et al. 2018).
Conflict
People of different cultures, when works in one team expecting conflict is a common thing. Just like the people who work together in the same organization or team has bound to experience different opinions, perceptions, communications, values, and interpersonal styles, etc. (Alemu, 2016). I have learned that the difference of the values, norms, social interest in our cultures are mainly has been programmed in our brain to process the behavior pattern of the other individuals according to our beliefs and knowledge structure. When two persons meet with completely different perception and values, it is common that the other party would misunderstand the values and motives of the other individual. I have learned that there are high chances of cultural classes in my team as it was formed by members from numerous cultures, which can to an individual’s tolerance for a cultural situation and may give rise to conflict. In our multicultural virtual team, there were changes of contradictions and confrontations on each of the different values or assumptions that were mentioned. Conflicts can, at a times, be hard to solve as the people are not as aware of their own values as that of the values of the others (Price and Ochieng, 2017).
Multicultural virtual team recommendations of overcoming the mentioned challenges
There are a number of recommendations that can be provided by different studies to help a virtual team overcome the challenges that they face in multicultural organizations of teams, as mentioned in the above points. The following suggestions can be followed by the people who work with or within a multicultural team (Cox, 2019).
Accepting the difference in culture
One of the major problems faced by the multicultural teams is that the team members themselves are not aware of their own cultural roots. I believe that cultural tolerance and cultural empathy are two of the most basic needs of maintaining an openness of communication in a multicultural team. In order to minimize this negativity and facilitate meaningful communication, we should be open to more intelligent culturally and have an open heart for cultural diversity that is the other team member’s cultural values to be understood and given value. ( Engelhard and Holtbrügge, 2017)
Motivation
Motivation is also another critical factor for the multicultural communication. Sometimes motivating a team member of the same culture is not the same when motivating a team member of different culture. That is the reason why some organizations always prefer to study and learn in groups rather than individual self (Lee et al. 2018).
Managing communications
Mostly in the multicultural scenario it is to be remembered that it is always better to have more communications and interaction than non. From studies it has been found that the term communication and collaboration are left unclear most of the times hence the recommended to manage the frequency and complexity team of communication in this multicultural virtual groups (Lisak et al. 2016).
Conflict management strategies
As mostly the social norms and the standards went missing in case of virtual atmosphere such environment can lead to the arise of unwanted conflicts. Differences in the culture gives rise to conflicts which significantly hamper the performance of the virtual team of online (Karjalainen and Benhaida 2018). To be prepared for any unwanted conflict situations in order to deal with the conflict factors appropriately with right solutions have helped in dealing with those conflicting situations appropriately is the main factor in assuring better move, improvement of understanding and trust , enhancement of relationship between of working members and improving of the creative thinking. In case of a conflict the team must know how to maintain the conflict under control by means of conflict management theories and strategies. In the case of a problem or conflict the coach is responsible to clarify the problem and give clear instructions to management the conflicting situation of the virtual team. In order to solve conflict the management must stop taking sides and give clear instructions and look for appropriate solutions (Melón-Ramos, 2016).
Conclusion
Thus from the assignment report it can be concluded that the multicultural virtual team comes with its own benefits and challenges, in one hand it diversifies the experience of a learner on the other hand it can cause communication barriers.
Reference List
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