Multi-cultural Teams & Their Leadership Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Multi-cultural Teams & Their Leadership - Essay Example This paper aims to highlight the major issues that may hinder the success of such a team. Communication barriers are the first issue which may hinder the success of a multi-cultural team. The Swiss culture is said to have a bilingual culture where French, German, Romansh and Italian are said to be the official languages. However, the point of debate is the expertise of people in speaking and understanding all these languages. The Swiss culture, hence, lacks communication ease and conformity with all people in an organization or a group. Moreover, there are certain words like â€Å"achievement, commitment, common sense †¦management and skill† which lack corresponding vocabulary in German language. Thus, there is also a possibility of miscommunication and misunderstanding due to the language differences in a culturally diverse team. To overcome this barrier, the leaders and organizations may approach a language learning and training program for the workers. Moreover, the us e of soft facial expressions, appropriate tone of voice and continuous reminders of the important tasks may help in reducing the risks associated with the language and communication barrier (Adler 1997). Another problem which the multicultural group of workers can face is on reaching a common consensus. These people belong to different backgrounds and may have different perspectives on different issues. Thus everyone has his own views and they find it difficult to reach a conclusion on deciding upon certain things. These workers tend to be from a diverse background and disagree on many issues. Multicultural teams have to be managed properly so that they do not face difficulties when reaching this common consensus. These multicultural teams might be facing the problem of miscommunication and the manager should look after this. It is necessary that the manager helps the team to reach a common consensus by providing each and every worker with the necessary information about the other. The perspectives of the diverse workers are laid together so that every worker can understand it and follow the action plan. Members of a culturally diverse workforce tend to lack trust in each other than the members of a homogenous workforce. The reason for this is the diversity in the workforce that comes along with the people of different culture. The team in the superstore is related to all American, Swiss, Italian and German culture and the problem can start when one group of workers consider the other inferior. Lack of trust can occur when the Americans consider the people from other cultures to be inferior to them in terms of education and lifestyle. Similarly the people belonging to the Swiss culture would be more acquainted with the policies of the stores and hence might consider the other people inferior. It is here that the role of the manager comes into play to help them collaborate with each other. Trust can be reinforced if the managers provide the workers time to know each other. The workers should be made to work with each other so that they can get a grasp of each other’s culture. Halverson and Tirmizi (2008) put forward that trust is a major factor which helps the team members to define the role of each other. Hence it can be concluded that trust is a major factor which can help the multicultural workers to get together. Jealousy is also one of the problems that the workers in a multicultural force