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.
Reckitt Benckiser, was chosen as it is one of the companies that follows a really culturally diverse workplace and is very focussed on teamwork. An experiment with a multicultural team and a mononational team at the company Reckitt Benckiser should provide to what extent the hypotheses are confirmed or not and therefore how cultural diversity affects task conflict, cohesion and trust based. Moreover, the dissertation aims to try and find answers why there could or could not be a confirmation of the theory with help of individual and group interviews with the multicultural team.
Outline of chapters:
This paper is composed of six chapters.
The second chapter presents the most essential literature concerning the effects cultural diversity has on team processes. The literature review is divided into two parts. The first part reviews the 'optimistic view' which contains researchers that see the effects positively. On the other hand the second part presents the 'pessimistic view" where researchers concentrate on the negative aspects cultural diversity has on group processes in work teams.
The third chapter outlines the method used in this dissertation. It includes the research purpose and philosophy followed by the approach and the research strategy. This chapter on the one hand justifies the method used and on the other hand also represents its limitations.
In chapter four the findings from the questionnaire of the experiment conducted at the company Reckitt Benckiser are presented.
Chapter five provides an evaluation of the correlation between the variables cultural diversity and task conflict, cohesion, and trust based on the experiment. These findings are compared with the developed hypotheses of the theoretical part of the dissertation and afterwards analysed.
The final chapter of this work presents first of all a conclusion. Nevertheless suggestions for further research are recommended in the area of multicultural teams.
