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Managing Diverse Teams

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Design a set of the best practices for leadership of cross-cultural, virtual teams. Consider the following questions:

1. What are the challenges posed by cultural diversity among team members? Pay particular attention to the ways in which cross-cultural teams are unique.

2. How important is an understanding of the individual cultures represented on the team to successful team managers? Should your best practice be culture-specific or apply to cross-cultural management in general? Cite specific examples in your analysis.

3. What are the human resource considerations for designing cross-cultural and/or virtual teams? How are considerations for these two groups similar or different?

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Solution Summary

This solution provides guidelines for designing effective cross-cultural teams in 1000 words without references.

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Cross-cultural Teams
As organizations are expanding beyond the local boundary, international staffing has become more common. As a result companies consist of staff from the four corners of the globe. Cross cultural teams have several advantages like:
• Facilitating the building of interpersonal relationships
• Fostering mutual understanding and respect
• Providing solutions, guidelines, and techniques to help the team building process
Amidst advantages crops issues in the areas of management approach, expectations, decision making, planning, conflict resolution and communication styles. Following are some of the other major problems with cross-cultural teams:
• Communication, language, and expression
While everybody on the team might be speaking English, but there could be misinterpretations in understanding certain forms of slangs or colloquialisms. Due to misunderstandings the whole intent of teamwork gets spoiled leading to wastage of time and resources. Other differences are in the language and expression of the team. It is very likely that few members of the team do not communicate in English which is the main language of interaction in the group. Some members could have totally opposite expressions than others in the team, though they might not mean to go against the team. Differences of such kind make decision making or even day-to-day working difficult among team members.
• Work Style
Work style and approaches may also vary when a team has cross-cultural mix of individuals. Some work cultures, like American encourage individual contributions while other cultures may prefer employees being tied to the supervisor for decision making. When the team has a mix of such individuals, individualistic team members may come across as aggressive team players while others who are not so individualistic may merge into the team and outwardly seem to contribute very little to the team ...

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