International collaboration can be difficult, because colleagues must cross time zones, language barriers and cultural divides. Ask those who were betting on the Daimler-Chrysler megamerger. That union ultimately failed, with many blaming the two companies’ cultural discord.
How can companies cultivate effective collaboration across cultural divides? Yih-Teen Lee of the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de la Empresa at the University of Navarra in Spain and Minna Paunova of Copenhagen Business School look to the self-managed multicultural team. This is a working unit made up of people from different cultures who are responsible for executing a team task.
Data were collected from more than 250 business students working in 36 culturally diverse teams at a European business school during one academic year. On average the teams had eight members from seven different countries, and there were no formally assigned leaders. In the course of nine months, they were periodically graded on team assignments. They were also surveyed and otherwise assessed for their teamwork, dynamics and performance by the researchers and by an independent evaluator who did not know the study’s hypotheses.
Especially when engaging with knowledge work, the authors write, these teams’ larger collective sets of skills and viewpoints foster creativity. What’s more, their wider range of capabilities allows them “to serve a variety of client needs across space and time.”
How do they work, and how do they work best? The short answer is: Training makes a difference. Lee and Paunova’s study points to practical tips for working groups to thrive.
The longer answer is: You don’t need to have a Brazilian mom and an Indian dad with a Swiss education to contribute positively to multicultural teams’ success. In their study of 36 multinational teams made up of more than 250 business students from more than 40 countries, the authors found that what’s really critical is fostering collective global leadership — and having a team-learning orientation is a way to get there.
The authors predicted that multicultural teams would be positively influenced by a “learning orientation.” Learning-oriented individuals aren’t afraid of failure and are eager to try new things. By contrast, those who have a “performance orientation” are more eager to demonstrate their competence in current tasks.
Anyone who has lived abroad can tell you that adapting to a different culture is a social learning process. The same is true in multicultural work environments. On a team level, the study confirmed that learning orientation can drive higher performance, efficacy and commitment, as well as improved team dynamics.
At the same time, Lee and Paunova found that, when team members already are willing to put group goals above their own individual glory, learning to be open is less important.
To achieve success, recent scholarship suggests that global leadership should be distributed across multiple team members. This implies that team members are open both to offer guidance and to receive it from all other team members, regardless of their cultures or nationalities.
When it works well, collective global leadership can boost team performance by driving greater effort and efficiency, as the Lee/Paunova study confirmed for its business-school teams. Furthermore, shared responsibility improves the intrateam environment, allowing happier and more comfortable members to deliver improved results.
Is “learning orientation” a fixed trait, or can it be developed? The latter, write the authors, who offer three concrete tips to boost learning orientation, and thus collective leadership and performance, in multicultural teams.
1. HIRE LEARNING-ORIENTED TEAM MEMBERS.
The authors note that “learning orientation not only makes individual team members more leaderlike, but also contributes to their effective participation in the global leadership process.”
2. DEVELOP EXISTING EMPLOYEES’ LEARNING ORIENTATION.
Implement “seminars and training tools designed to show that skills can be learned and that mistakes are a natural step in the learning process,” the authors advise.
3. COACH EMPLOYEES TO ADAPT TO MULTICULTURAL TEAMS.
Organizational programs can teach people to feel safer, to identify with their multicultural teams and to be more trusting of team members from other cultures.
In short, Lee and Paunova conclude that multicultural teams perform best when they have collective global leadership supported by a positive team environment. To get there, a key input is learning orientation, which can be acquired.
