MAR038-6 Intercultural Business Competencies Assignment Sample 2023
1. Introduction
Working under international teams is significant in developing the productivity of the employees. The current report depicts the importance of team working as well team building while working under international teams. In addition to this, maintaining culture across an organisation is also important and is discussed thoroughly in this report. Cultural issues arise while working across international teams because of the multicultural people present there. The discussions in this report are mainly based on the importance of team working as well as maintaining culture while working in international teams. Theories are provided to give evidence upon the fact that team working and culture maintenance are needed. At last, a portfolio is made in the appendix to discuss culture as well as quality management in a workplace.
2. Team working and team building
Employees are the main component of an organisation and they work hard to enhance the profitability as well as productivity of an organisation. It has been observed that the efficiency of employees is increased when they work in international teams. This is because of the fact that they are able to interact properly with the international employees having different cultures as well as values. As stated by Gonglewski and Helm (2020), the driving force to make the interaction stronger in international teams is a team working. Employees who work in international teams share ideas as well as thoughts with their co-workers. However, it is noted that the main issue arises in the context of communication while serving under international teams. According to Klaic et al. (2020), inefficient communication decreases an organisation’s profitability to a great extent. Thus, working in a single team increases the interaction power as well as communication with various international employees effectively.
Every organisation has a specific goal to meet and employees are the ones who help in meeting the goals. International teams consist of employees from different cultures as well as languages. It can be argued that employees may feel issues while communicating with employees from different cultures. Hence, team building as well as team working enables employees to work effectively and share the ideas with other team members through proper communication. As stated by Lacerenza et al. (2018), employees who work in a team are able to reduce stress and their social interactions with international employees are strengthened. Thus, it can be argued that working under international teams enables employees to complete meticulous tasks easily. According to Walliser et al. (2019), the knowledge and values of the employees are expanded in team working. Employees learn various facts as well as information from international employees while working at one time. This increases the productivity of the employees and they can readily provide a competitive advantage to organisations.
The importance of working in an international team can be explained with one of my own experiences. During my internship days, I was given an opportunity to handle a team of 10 people as an assistant legal adviser in a financial company, namely “Orridge” Company. The main task was to research on legal matters of the organisation for conducting legal analysis of the business. It is noted that in my team there were people from different international countries such as the USA, Russia, South Africa, Malaysia, and many others. Thus, at first, it was difficult for me to handle my international team because of their different ideas as well as thoughts. In addition to this, the employees themselves faced difficulties in handling their own work effectively. Hence, I started promoting effective communication among the employees in international teams after every working hour. According to Pollack and Matous (2019), regular meetings, as well as discussions with international workers, decrease the disparity in communication. Slowly, I found that my team was working properly and they were able to seek out their own issues effectively.
In addition to this, our project faced some issues in time of monitoring the implementation of the company’s legal clauses. However, the strong interaction formed between my international team has enabled me to seek out organisational internal legal issues effectively. As argued by Ginting et al. (2020), team working as well as collaboration enhances the internal process of an organisation effectively. My team utilised their knowledge and shared valuable thoughts with each other to solve legal disparities. With the help of effective teamwork, the issue regarding company’s internal legal matters have been solved and the organisational business has been able to gain flow once again. Thus, it can be argued that team working and team building enhances the productivity and profitability of a company and in turn, enables the employees to become more productive in the future.
3. Cultures across international teams
Globalisation has increased to a great level in recent times and organisations have felt the importance to work with various multicultural teams. Team diversity enables an organisation to increase productivity so that competitive advantage is attained. According to Swain et al. (2020), maintaining culture across organisations is important so that employees feel safe and motivated to work. It has been observed that the international team consists of multicultural people and thus, the language, as well as communication styles of the employees, is different. This raises language as well as cultural issues among employees and thus, their efficiency and productivity are decreased. As argued by Mannion and Davies (2018), organisational culture puts a strong impact on the working capabilities of employees in international teams. A good organisational culture represents the availability of efficient leaders, effective salaries, and employee well-being as well as excellent employee appreciation. Hence, organisations must promote good organisational culture so that employees are able to work properly in international teams.
Employees serving under international teams face various problems as well as issues while working across cultures in the international teams. According to Szydło and Grześ-Bukłaho (2020), communication is a factor that derails the functioning of an organisation across multicultural teams. This is because of the fact the languages, as well as preferences of the individuals, are different in a multicultural team. For example, a Malaysian will prefer to talk in Malay and a Chinese will always try to talk in the Chinese language. This creates a huge language problem and the productivity of organisations thus gets decreased. According to Roscoe et al. (2019), cultures are sometimes explicit, direct as well as indirect in communication. It can be argued that direct communication is often considered to be offensive and indirect communication is unproductive as well as aggressive in the interaction of teams. Hence, conflict arises between the team members having different cultures as well as language styles.
The second challenge that employees feel while working across cultures in various international teams is variance in the attitudes of employees towards the hierarchy. As stated by Wagstaff and Burton-Wylie (2018), interaction with the organisational hierarchy becomes difficult if the attitudes of employees are different towards it. It can be taken as an example that employees from some cultures are disrespectful to the hierarchy while others are quite devoted to organisational hierarchy. This difference in attitudes across cultures in international teams reduces the operational efficiency of an organisation to a great extent. According to Obeidat et al. (2018), clashes observe if employees have differential attitudes towards the hierarchy. However, the clashes can be improved if continuous interaction is promoted between the multicultural employees and the organisation. It has been observed that multicultural employees have different decision-making thoughts and thus, their views differ from one another. This creates a huge disparity in taking important decisions of an organisation and in turn, decreases the profitability of an organisation.
The significance of working across a multicultural team can be illustrated with a suitable real-life experience. After my graduation, I was selected by a renowned financial company named “Orridge” for an internship. The duration of my internship was two years and I was given the role of a group leader of a team of legal advisors. The task assigned to us was to proof read and suggest required changes of the organisational legal documents along with drafting of some legal contracts. Surprisingly, I found my team consists of multicultural people from Japan, Malaysia, the USA as well as Indonesia. The problem arose in handling the team with different communication styles as well as attitudes. I found some respectful towards others while someone’s behaviour is quite offensive to other employees. Complacent arose in promoting good communication with the multicultural teams and because of the completion of the signed task got delayed for two weeks. However, I did not lose hope and tried to make communication easier among them. After discussing a lot with my team, I found that everyone knew English well. Hence, I made English, the only compulsory language to speak in. In addition, I started celebrating the festivals of multicultural employees and made the participation of everyone compulsory to those festivals. This increased the social interaction among the multicultural employees and they were able to share common beliefs as well as attitudes properly. At last, I was able to promote good communication as well as values among my employees and got success in the project. Hence, it can be argued that working with a multicultural team increases the creativity, productivity of employees effectively.
4. Theories
Tuckman’s Teamwork Theory
It has been said that only then a business can be able to flourish and achieve its sublime height if the business includes various diverse teams. Having a diverse team in business has been considered as one of the important aspects as this contributes to developing new and modified ideas (Steenkamp, 2019). Based on the opinion of Liu (2018), it can be stated that in order to build a perfect team in accordance with the requirement, international organizations can follow Tuckman’s Teamwork Theory in the work culture.
Tuckerman’s teamwork theory has stated that a team needs to go through five main stages. The five main stages are “forming”, “storming”, “norming”, “performing”, “adjourning” (Siregar et al. 2018). As per the view of Siregar et al. (2018), these phases are closely interrelated and have their importance in order to build up an effective team in the international platform (Kanto et al. 2020). This specific team building theory can be effective for increasing the clarity of communication and the trust within the teammates.
In accordance with the opinion of Nugroho et al. (2018), it can be stated that as this theory has been developed based on five different stages of team building, the compatibility of the team members can be grown easily. On the other hand, based on personal experience it can be stated that this theory will be helpful for the international companies where for the cultural diversity several issues concur within teammates regarding compatibility management and communicational transparency as well.
Conflict theory
It has been previously stated that a diverse culture of an organization can be beneficial for the growth of the business. However, often it has been encountered that for having a diverse corporate culture the organization has started confronting several conflicts between different classes of workers (Baber, 2018). This conflict sometimes occurs as the employees have different cultural and social backgrounds (Abd Hamid et al. 2019). In reference to this particular fact, international organizations need to focus on following the conflict theory to minimize the potentiality of occurring conflict.
In the above figure, it has been seen that an international organization needs to consider several aspects of business in order to maintain the proper socio-cultural value of the company in the global market (Mawoli and Adamu, 2020). Based on these requirements, the conflict theory can be evolved as an effective one for managing conflict by initiating an effective competition among employees which needs to be harmless for employees’ culture as well (Chiheb et al. 2019). Here, the employees will be able to increase their ability to perform any job under pressure in an effective manner by generating new ideas.
As per personal experience, it can be stated that this particular conflict theory will be able to create some jeering and prodding among the teams or employees that will enable them to perform better. As per the view of Chiheb et al. (2018), this phenomenon will be able to increase the potentiality of the company’s employees that will contribute to managing conflict and invading talent within the business at the same time.
5. Conclusion
The report can be concluded by saying that both team working as well as cultures is necessary for increasing organisation’s productivity. Ideas, as well as thoughts, are shared among employees in team working. In addition to this, the communication is enhanced and employees are able to interact properly with international teams. Apart from all these, the working capabilities of employees are increased and they feel motivated while working in an organisation. Employee motivation increases the productivity as well as profitability of an organisation to a great extent.
On the contrary, cultures across international teams put a strong impact on operational efficiency. Employees mainly feel demotivated while communicating with a multicultural team. This decreases productivity as well as efficiency of employees. In addition to this, the multicultural team has different attitudes as well as beliefs towards each other. This hampers the social interaction among the employees and in turn, deteriorates the operational efficiency of the management. However, a multicultural team increases the creativity of individual employees and in turn, enhances the productive growth of the employees.
- Recommendations
On the basis of the above discussions, several recommendations have been suggested regarding team management and cultural integrity within a multicultural organisation in the below section:
Recommendation 1: The organisational professionals or leaders needs to facilitate meaningful communication
As it has been seen in several previous studies that in the multicultural teams, the issues mostly raised by the facility it provides for having a meaningful communication. Moreover, as the team members come with different cultural and linguistic background, the team member has faced challenges in understanding each other’s perspective (Wagstaff and Burton-Wylie (2018). Observing this core problem of maintaining clarity in communication among the team members, the leaders needs to facilitate meaningful communication among the team members (Obeidat et al. 2018). As per the view of Mannion and Davies (2018), by helping the members to know about each other’s cultural background and selecting a common language of communication which will be understandable for every individual of the team can be beneficial.
Recommendation 2: The leaders and the other members of a multicultural team need to avoid asking close questions
In several cases, it has been encountered that the team members of the multicultural team tale the close questions as a way of bullying each other that is against of the corporate cultural rules. As per the view of Murzi et al. (2020), it is not lawfully correct to tease one’s co-workers just because of the person has come from different cultural background. These kind of phenomenon harm the integrity and harmonic attributes of a multicultural team especially the teased person feels awful to work with other members. This can decrease the efficiency of the person who is targeted which will contribute in decreasing the motivation of that professional as well (McEwan and Beauchamp, 2020). Therefore, the organisational leaders or the team leaders have been suggested to avoid close questions when it comes to the matters like understanding each other’s cultural background and many more.
References
Journals
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Baber, W.W., 2018. Identifying macro phases across the negotiation lifecycle. Group Decision and Negotiation, 27(6), pp.885-903.
Chiheb, F., Boumahdi, F. and Bouarfa, H., 2019. A new model for integrating big data into phases of decision-making process. Procedia Computer Science, 151, pp.636-642.
Das Swain, V., Saha, K., Reddy, M.D., Rajvanshy, H., Abowd, G.D. and De Choudhury, M., 2020, April. Modeling organizational culture with workplace experiences shared on glassdoor. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-15).
Ginting, H., Mahiranissa, A., Bekti, R. and Febriansyah, H., 2020. The effect of outing Team Building training on soft skills among MBA students. The International Journal of Management Education, 18(3), p.100423.
Gonglewski, M. and Helm, A.H., 2020. Real-client projects in the LSP classroom: Business and German students teamworking across disciplines.
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Kanto, S., Wisadirana, D., Chawa, A.F. and Umanailo, M.C.B., 2020, March. Change in community work patterns. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management (pp. 2496-502).
Klaic, A., Burtscher, M.J. and Jonas, K., 2020. Fostering team innovation and learning by means of team‐centric transformational leadership: The role of teamwork quality. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 93(4), pp.942-966.
Kosmützky, A., 2018. A two‐sided medal: On the complexity of international comparative and collaborative team research. Higher Education Quarterly, 72(4), pp.314-331.
Lacerenza, C.N., Marlow, S.L., Tannenbaum, S.I. and Salas, E., 2018. Team development interventions: Evidence-based approaches for improving teamwork. American psychologist, 73(4), p.517.
Liu, X., 2018. International Publicity Translation of Tourism Culture in Central China from the Perspective of Skopos Theory. International journal of linguistics, literature and culture, 4(2), pp.1-8.
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Appendixes
Appendix 1: Article 1 (Collectivism Individualism)
In accordance with the journal named “Collective Versus Individualist National Cultures”, it can be stated that in the recent scenario of globalization business has started expanding beyond the local boundaries of a country (Sims, 2009). As the business has started confronting a different atmosphere in the global platform the organizational business has started encountering several opportunities and threats at the same time (Zhang et al. 2018). In this journal article, it has been studied how ethical decision-making has been interrupted and impacted by different cultural aspects of different nations.
Based on the result of this and other studies based on the same research topic, it can be stated that employees of Taiwan, a country of collective culture, have the ability or power to make an unethical decision if the decision goes for the organizational business (Miller et al. 2018). On the other hand, in the selected literature, it has been seen that as the individualist country, the United States of America has been selected (Jung and Hinds, 2018). Along with this 225 employees who work on a full-time basis, have been selected from both the states as the sample population for this study (Sims, 2009). As per the view of Sims (2009), the employees of America are more likely to openly question the practice of their organization that is unethical.
In hypothesis one, it has been stated that the organizations of the collective cultures are able to make unethical decisions for the sake of the business of respective organizations whereas, countries of individualist culture have not been able to do so (Sims, 2009). On the contrary, in the second hypothesis, it has been stated that employees who come from the individualist culture of the United States of America have possessed the habit of making the unethical decision more than those made by employees of the collective culture of Taiwan for personal benefits (Sims, 2009). In addition to these two hypotheses built up within “Collective Versus Individualist National Cultures”, hypothesis three mentioned that the employees of the United States of America are more open in the case of business and society in comparison to the employees of Taiwan.
In conclusion, it has been stated that the reason behind considering unethical behaviour for the sake of organizational business, among the employees of collective culture is high because of the loyalty they have possessed in the corporate sections too (Sims, 2009). The study has found that the employees of collective culture found withholding less ethical rather than being told the entire truth. Based on this situational need of the collective culture employees, the organizations need to develop well-made ethical codes along with effective training programmes (Sims, 2009). On the other hand, as per this study, employees of both the states have responded in a significant manner in establishing the second hypothesis of that study (Sims, 2009). Additionally, a study has found that as Americans like to speak their minds, the ethical conflict within employees of individualist culture can only be raised by the question of discrimination.
Appendix 2: Article 2 (Quality management)
Quality management is one of the necessary processes when an organisation looks to deliver high-end products to satisfy customers. It can be stated based on the result of several situations that as the organizations have started stepping into the process of internationalization, the organizations have started confronting several issues regarding diversity and quality management (Safapour et al. 2018). Based on this fact, the study namely “Quality management: a cross-cultural perspective” has been conducted, in addition, to representing the core issues and dilemmas of cultural management, this study has been focussed on the effectiveness of “Hofstede’s national cultural framework” within the international organizational culture (Vecchi and Brennan, 2009). In order to examine the validity of the argument that is culturally specific, this particular study has been conducted and the result has been discussed in a contrasting manner on the basis of quality management.
As per the chosen literature, the study has been conducted on the basis of a survey that has been done in 23 countries. The survey responses have been collected based on the international manufacturing strategy survey in the year 2006 (Vecchi and Brennan, 2009). Questionnaires have included self-administered questions for the head of the manufacturing farms that have been classified by ISIC code (Vecchi and Brennan, 2009). In several studies, it has been seen that the culture of an organization has been maintained based on four particular dimensions (Kosmützky, 2018). Through the selected literature study, it has been seen that from a cross-cultural perspective all the four aspects of culture have been able to create a significant effect on the quality management practice. On the other hand, one of the dimensions of the culture can create an impact on the practice of quality performance of the employees in a cross-cultural perspective (Vecchi and Brennan, 2009). By addressing the managerial implications of quality management, this study has developed hypotheses that are especially culture-specific.
The chosen literature has showcased that the study of that particular literature has been conducted in order to find the better alignment of the quality practice and performance in culturally diverse workplaces (Vecchi and Brennan, 2009). This study has contributed to the studies of relations between the priorities, performances and practices within the international organization which have followed the “Hofstede’s national cultural framework”. Based on this fact, this article has contributed to finding both the similarities and differences within quality practices among organizational businesses of different countries (Vecchi and Brennan, 2009). It has been seen that the majority of the literature focuses on explaining the differences but this paper has focused on explaining similarities and similarities of the quality practice of managers at the same time (Vecchi and Brennan, 2009). An original framework that is interpretive has been introduced and included in this paper. Along with that, this paper offers knowledge about the way of explanation of the four cultural dimensions in the perspective of best fit or compensation.
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