Learning to work together as a global team requires significant effort and should be included as part of the organizational strategy.While learning how to coordinate their interdependency to produce a product or service, team members also need to create a common level of understanding the cultural perspectives of other members of the team. Global communication “requires the ability to translate the cultural meaning behind the words and to anticipate the impact of spoken or written words” (Odenwald, 1996) such that the collective outcomes are realized. Matveev and Nelson (2004) maintain that cross-cultural communication competence improves team performance by 20 percent.
Meeting in person is helpful to establish ground rules and begin to build relationships between team members. These sessions provide members with a personal connection to other team members and often serve as the reference point when potential conflict arises. Patterns that are established early in a group’s life are often those that last throughout the team’s lifecycle (Gersick, 1988; Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1998). Once members have spent time together they are more likely to engage in dual perspective and ask for clarification instead of making assumptions. Some basic items should be addressed in theinitial meetings, such as the team’s goal(s) and agreement on team protocols. It also essential for virtual teams to agree on the frequency of their meetings and expectations for each member’s participation.
To address the issues with time, Oldenwald (1996) suggests developing a “team time culture”. Montoya-Weiss, Massey, and Song (2001) state that having a pre-established communication plan can also help “address the communication challenges facing virtual teams as it introduces temporal coordination mechanisms”. They also discovered that a rhythm of coordination mechanisms, such as a regularly scheduled team meeting, created a structure that “mitigated the negative effects of avoidance and compromise”.
Hurn and Jenkins (2000) cited one successful training program in which the members of multicultural teams assembled and attended training classes together to address issues and develop action plans for working together more effectively. The group established concrete guidelines and had clear agreed-on agendas going forward. They established a policy to use a skillful chairperson to facilitate future meetings, frequently provide summaries of key points, and
use questions more effectively to elicit feedback from each other during the meetings. Working in a global team requires even more clarity about team protocols for communicating. For groups to work together successfully, they must negotiate their roles, norms, and behavior, as well as convey their various approaches to information processing. To illustrate, one virtual team defined what it meant to them when other members of the team did not respond to their questions posted by e-mail. They agreed if a team member sent a question and did not receive a response within 24 hours, one should assume the message was never received and the sender should re-send or use the telephone depending on the urgency of the question. Another protocol they created was to establish a priority code for their e-mail subject headings and voice mail messages. They agreed that a “code 1” meant “this is a ‘showstopper’ . . . I can’t move forward until you respond”; “code 2” meant “this is the action I will take unless I hear from you within 24 hours”; “code 3” indicated “this information is For Your Information (FYI) only and does not require a response.” In this way, they were able to help each other organize their communication
exchanges and work more efficiently.
Maznevski and DiStefano (2000) describe three group processes for working with multiple cultures on a team: mapping, bridging, and integrating. They define mapping as having an understanding of the team’s “compositional differences and the corresponding implications for bringing to the team different knowledge perspectives and approaches to relationship management”. Mapping requires suspending the assumption of similarity—believing that “others think like I do.” Useful maps create cognitive frameworks for understanding the preferences of others by providing a way to look at patterns (e.g., Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or Hofstede’s dimensions). However, caution must be taken to avoid the tendency of using quick labels and thereby bypassing the need for deeper understanding. Bridging is the process of communicating across those differences to ensure that each member understands the others. Bridging involves recentering, where team members find common perspectives and explore them to identify important definitions and goals. In this way, teams manage their norms so that everyone is involved and has an equal opportunity to be heard. Integrating is bringing the different perspectives and preferences together, resolving any differences among them, and building on these differences to generate innovation and quality in the team’s work. The skills include managing participation, resolving disagreements, and constructively building new processes for the future.
Although the challenges are ever present, team members need to find a unifying goal that they have in common, focus on the issues rather than the personalities, and find ways to include everyone’s perspective. Surfacing disagreements and articulating protocols builds the team so they can solve problems more effectively. Ultimately, work group performance and the individual members’ attachment to the group itself are related (Kirchmeyer & Cohen, 1992). The success of a global team depends on the ability to create a shared team identity, to develop mutual respect and trust among team members, and to build supportive and collaborative personal relationships between team members. Goto’s (1997) work reinforces this, affirming that “knowledge of the other culture [alone] is not effective. Rather [the] focus [should] be on encouraging perceptions of similarity, and opportunity for positive interactions”. This foundation creates the culture of the team that emerges from the interaction of the individual members at work and communication exchanges between individuals themselves, not just between their respective cultures
Subject: GLOBAL TEAM STRATEGIES FOR INCREASING EFFECTIVENESS 
Thu Apr 24, 2014 12:13 am
