The effect of cultural diversity on group processes in work teams (PDF)

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction:
As more and more people immigrate and organizations globalize lead to the fact that people with different cultural roots have to collaborate with one another and to work together in a local workplace. Furthermore, competitive challenges and the importance of flexibility and adjustment on the part of companies there can be witnessed in a great expansion of work teams. Therefore, a commonplace practice concerning the culturally diverse composition of work groups can be recognized as is the case in organizations like Unilever, ABB, the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation, IBM and Reckitt Benckiser, only to mention a few.
Organizations have to develop effective multicultural teams, which means that organizations have to think more clearly about cross-cultural issues and more fully understand and value the benefits of cultural diversity in teams. Furthermore due to the continued growth of culturally diverse work teams, the understanding the effect cultural diversity has on team processes is both appropriate and pressing. This fact is very important as the team effectiveness depends on the processes.
Due to being involved in such a multicultural working environment by having different student jobs at an internationally operating company called Reckitt Benckiser, practical insight was gained into the trend ¿multicultural teams¿. This insight and the growing trend of using multicultural teams in today¿s organizations make it interesting to deepen the phenomenon within the dissertation. The author is interested in gaining knowledge of which effects cultural diversity has on team processes.
Academic objectives of dissertation:
This study follows Earley & Gardner¿s and Watson¿s perception of multicultural teams that implies that those teams consist of two or more members that have different nationalities and therefore different cultural backgrounds.
This dissertation aims to provide a deeper understanding of the effects cultural diversity has on team processes and which consequences this can have on team effectiveness.
The aim of the present study is to investigate the main negative and positive effects cultural diversity has on team processes. Existing researcher¿s views about this issue are shown and confronted. The main objective of this study is to investigate three group processes ¿ task conflict, cohesion and trust. Hypothesis will be developed concerning these three issues in order to test them in practice. [...]