Challenges of Managing Global Teams
The inception of globalization has caused challenges in almost all concerns of business organizations. The increasingly global nature of business has compelled the companies to hire experts from cross-national borders infusing diversity in the organization demography. Teams combining people from varied geographical, cultural and linguistic background are formed to tap into distributed human resource around the globe in order to enhance organizational performance through varied expertise, ideas of innovation regardless of geographical locations (Lacerenza et al. 2015). This changed situation has created such a scenario that employees from different national, cultural, ethnic and language groups are working together as a team and thereby, causing leadership challenges for the team leaders. The issue that global teams are usually fraught with collaboration challenges has attracted major researches on this area to be conducted (Gibbs and Boyraz 2015). The researches already done in this matter of concern have provided recommendations for human resource management on international level as well as highlighted the changed competency factors of leadership in the 21st century. However, the most crucial demand that global teams place is to establish interaction among the members of diverse backgrounds across time and space.
Differences in language and cultural background tend to sabotage the easy communication in a team that is supposed to be there. Besides teams that rely on virtual communication due to geographical barriers and alienated by time zones, face great challenges in communicating with each other and arranging meetings for conflicting schedules (Story et al. 2014). Technology has been of a great aid in this matter but it cannot be considered as a complementing substitute. Apart from this, a team is made of trust and reliability within the members on each other and in a global team relying only on virtual communication, this emotional dimension is found lacking. In fact, when working together with the scope of direct communication, the diverse cultural backgrounds pose as a potential challenge for the team leaders. Cultures grow values in people and shape their behavior and according to Hinds, Neeley and Cramton (2014), this has a profound impact on teamwork where candid exchange of viewpoints is fundamental.
Between the two communication barriers, language and cultural diversity, the latter one poses more challenge than the first one as cultural difference tend to create different kinds of difficulties. As stated by Magnusson, Schuster and Taras (2014), cultural dissimilarity raises the issues of power distance, masculinity and femininity culture perspectives, individualism and collectivism as well as different kinds of personality orientation. This is also the way of Gert Hofstede, who had described cultures across the world in five above-stated dimensions and this model has been an integral part of organizational culture literature since then. The concept of power distance as mentioned by Story et al. (2014), refers to the disparity between cultures with low power distance where equality in leaders and followers is exercised and cultures with high power distance where power holders enjoy privileges and that here power is regarded as a primary element of society (Gibbs and Boyraz 2015). On the other hand, cultures upholding masculine viewpoint exhibit aggressiveness in the workplace in achieving goals and value performance greatly. The feminine cultures, however, value the relationship and interdependence and most importantly, here roles are not segregated by sex differences. These divergent cultures having contrasting perspectives to things are bound to come up with challenges when working united as a team. In addition, there are some cultures that prioritize personal autonomy, individual achievement, freedom and privacy for individual, while some others believe in collectivism where collective opinion matters in the decision-making process rather than an individual’s authority. Cramton and Hinds (2014), rightly identifies this aspect having immense impact on the organizational culture and that these opposing viewpoints are essential to be neutralized by framing appropriate policies to address them. Orientation towards work too varies for individuals as cultures with long-term orientation highly value hard work and even personal sacrifice for work-achievement and future benefit is greatly approved (Magnusson, Schuster and Taras 2014). While on the other hand, short-term oriented cultures emphasize individual stability and growth than believing in future. These varied perspectives and values towards work create hindrances in team efficiency and establishing communication between diverse language and culture group of people is challenging for the global teams.
Communication Barriers
Since a team’s success relies greatly on assistance and cooperation, trust is the most important factor that promotes the both. However, as the global teams work on both physical and virtual communication the cultivation of trust also differs in these cases. According to Mockaitis, Zander and De Cieri (2016), the teams virtually connected lack familiarity and the physical interchange of emotions; naturally, in this case the factor of trust and dependence does not grow as desired. Consequently, the members may shy away from sharing ideas with each other and thus, diversity may adversely turn into liability, which could have been an asset for the team. However, Caligiuri and Lundby (2015), opines that the challenge with lacking mutual trust can be overcome if physical communication can be established and synergistic harnessing of diversity is made possible eliminating skepticism from the team environment.
People from various cultural background are bound naturally do not share common ground of opinion and ideas. This has been rightly identified by Cramton and Hinds (2014), that lack of common opinion creates problems in the decision-making process and that the difference of this results in people having varied preferences and goals for the same work. In addition, if members of a team do not have a universal ground of knowledge they are bound to face difficulty in comprehending one another’s perspectives and especially in collective tasks, the inferences are likely to vary from one member to another (Fan et al. 2014).
The organizations, at present time are mostly multinational and this is why they are to maintain a global team, which they strongly believe to be critical in order to achieve long-term success. However, the members of such teams may have different perspective to this view as they usually have a preconceived notion that companies in foreign land would prefer the local employees irrespective of their performances (Erez et al. 2013). This issue is somehow linked with lack of trust in the team environment as in a global team hesitation and cynicism mostly prevails. Organizations having global teams face challenges in promotions and appreciation cases they always have to worry about being fair for everyone and not being viewed as biased on any ground. On the other hand Biermeier-Hanson, Liu and Dickson (2015), argues that these are mostly self-imposed limitations on the members’ part and with proper guidance from the team leaders and managers these can easily be overcome. In order to resolve this, some scholars and business experts have proposed the idea that best mentoring is possible from the successful leaders who are considered as mainstream in that organization (Caligiuri and Lundby 2015). As an instance, a successful person from a country can provide deep insight to the culturally diverse workforce about the background of that nation and the organizational culture where they are working and many of scholars have supported this outlook to bias challenge.
Undoubtedly, in global teams where people across varied geographic and cultural zone work together to achieve a specific performance goal, the employees must be accepting towards one another (Caligiuri and Lundby 2015). However, occasionally it happens that in a diverse global team some employees tend to deny accepting any other perspective other than theirs. They refuse to acknowledge the presence of difference in their organization and hence, do not make any effort to adjust. Critics like Magnusson, Schuster and Taras (2014), have significantly pointed out how this resistance restrains the pace of advancement and silences the fresh and innovative ideas that could have been a positive feature for the organization.
Cultural Diversity
As Lacerenza et al. (2015) admits, that the role of technology is a widely recognized fact in forming a virtual team and the presence of technology has greatly facilitated the intercultural communications among a global team. In contrast to this view, many critics like Story et al. (2014), have come forward mentioning the repetitive and serious concerns that these global virtual teams have been facing. In the first place, among these challenges, the barrier of time zone appears when scheduling meetings. Apart from this, the factor of isolation and considerably low mutual emotional exchange is not to be ignored as highlighted by Hoch and Kozlowski (2014), the absence of collegial atmosphere and a friendly in office ambience greatly affects the work performance of the team members. While the presence of these has been proved enhancing the employee equations, the dearth of these emotional dimensions cannot certainly be supplemented by technology (Fan et al. 2014). Along with this, the virtually connected global teams also undergo challenges with language barriers and accents like any other global teams. However, the physical in-office proximity still has the chance to improve the communication styles, which seems apparently impossible for these virtually connected professionals. Shifting light to another major challenge of isolation, research literature significantly indicate that in order to achieve an optimum level of productivity consistent interaction with colleagues and supervisors is necessary. Such interactions set the platform for the team members to replicate their positive emotions and vent out all the negative thoughts. Here agreeing with Erez et al. (2013), it can be said that these physical interactions somewhere make the employees feel satisfied and thereby, motivated, without which an overall feeling of isolation and depression prevail on the employees that is hard to recover.
As the companies are becoming inclined to form teams geographically dispersed and that which can offer the best practical expertise, it has become more and more challenging for them to implement uniform policies for all the employees around the world. Even for the teams who work together in the same office space but the members belong to different language and cultural groups, it is also challenging to put appropriate policies for all into practice (Mockaitis, Zander and De Cieri 2016). Moreover, the task of framing a customized strategy grounded on the research data and employee assessments for maximizing the advantage of having a diverse and global team is also quite challenging.
Training a Global Team
In most of the organizations, team trainings are arranged to strengthen the performance of the employees in a team to improve their work performance as the team members have the same weaknesses more or less to be addressed. For a virtual global team as opined by Pinjani and Palvia (2013), it is not possible to attend to all the employees together and even if a company has to work with a global team with diversity in an office, the needs and skill developing requisites for them are bound to be different. For the virtual teams, the group process training and technology training have been suggested by Gilson et al. (2015), in which training is provided by web-based modules and the schedule of training is set as per the convenience of the team members geographically dispersed. On the other hand, for the global teams working in the same office space, require cross-cultural training as opinionated by Santillan and Horwitz (2016), so that they become well aware about the cultural differences in communication, work behaviors and in religious preferences.
Challenge of Cultivating Trust
Conclusion:
As the above assessment of literature shows, global teams with diversity and unusual expertise accumulated from across the world have immense possibilities, but the only challenge remains in proceeding forward as a team with all the members together. With the possibilities of such teams come the probable adversities of misunderstanding to be created due to communication and trust issue. Repeated workshops, training curriculum as well as e-learning programs especially for the virtual teams should be arranged to eliminate such issues from the team environment. The primary obligation of the HR departments and the leaders of such teams are to mitigate the social distance among the employees and to initiate cooperation and opinion exchange process within the team. As soon as the employees develop a congenial and steady relationship among themselves, the teams will be able to draw on the advantage of their diversity and face the organizational and market challenges in the most promising way.
References:
Biermeier-Hanson, B., Liu, M. and Dickson, M.W., 2015. Alternate views of global leadership: Applying global leadership perspectives to leading global teams. In leading global teams (pp. 195-223). Springer New York.
Caligiuri, P. and Lundby, K., 2015. Developing Cross-Cultural Competencies Through Global Teams. In Leading Global Teams (pp. 123-139). Springer New York.
Cramton, C.D. and Hinds, P.J., 2014. An embedded model of cultural adaptation in global teams. Organization Science, 25(4), pp.1056-1081.
Erez, M., Lisak, A., Harush, R., Glikson, E., Nouri, R. and Shokef, E., 2013. Going global: Developing management students’ cultural intelligence and global identity in culturally diverse virtual teams. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 12(3), pp.330-355.
Fan, K.T., Chen, Y.H., Wang, C.W. and Chen, M., 2014. E-leadership effectiveness in virtual teams: Motivating language perspective. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 114(3), pp.421-437.
Gibbs, J.L. and Boyraz, M., 2015. International HRM’s role in managing global teams. The Routledge companion to international human resource management, pp.532-551.
Gilson, L.L., Maynard, M.T., Jones Young, N.C., Vartiainen, M. and Hakonen, M., 2015. Virtual teams research: 10 years, 10 themes, and 10 opportunities. Journal of Management, 41(5), pp.1313-1337.
Hinds, P.J., Neeley, T.B. and Cramton, C.D., 2014. Language as a lightning rod: Power contests, emotion regulation, and subgroup dynamics in global teams. Journal of International Business Studies, 45(5), pp.536-561.
Hoch, J.E. and Kozlowski, S.W., 2014. Leading virtual teams: Hierarchical leadership, structural supports, and shared team leadership. Journal of applied psychology, 99(3), p.390.
Lacerenza, C.N., Zajac, S., Savage, N. and Salas, E., 2015. Team Training for Global Virtual Teams: Strategies for Success. In Leading Global Teams (pp. 91-121). Springer New York.
Magnusson, P., Schuster, A. and Taras, V., 2014. A process-based explanation of the psychic distance paradox: Evidence from global virtual teams. Management international review, 54(3), pp.283-306.
Mockaitis, A.I., Zander, L. and De Cieri, H., 2016. Special issue of International Journal of Human Resource Management: The benefits of global teams for international organizations: HR implications: Extended submission deadline: 12 February 2016.
Pinjani, P. and Palvia, P., 2013. Trust and knowledge sharing in diverse global virtual teams. Information & Management, 50(4), pp.144-153.
Santillan, C. and Horwitz, S.K., 2016. Application of Collaboration Technology to Manage Diversity in Global Virtual Teams: The ThinkLet-Based CE Approach. In Handbook of Research on Race, Gender, and the Fight for Equality (pp. 240-266). IGI Global.
Story, J.S., Barbuto Jr, J.E., Luthans, F. and Bovaird, J.A., 2014. Meeting the challenges of effective international HRM: Analysis of the antecedents of global mindset.
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