Intercultural team building

Internal business structures have been radically transformed in recent decades. Changes in areas such as transportation and communication technology and shifts towards global interdependence have resulted in companies becoming increasingly international and therefore intercultural.

In addition, the need to ‘go global’ and reduce costs requires companies to combine protecting international interests and reducing the number of employees. The solution in most cases has been the formation of intercultural teams.

As with all businesses, success depends on effective cooperation and communication within teams. However, the intercultural dimension of today’s teams brings with it new challenges. Successful team building involves not only the traditional needs to harmonize personalities but also languages, cultures, ways of thinking, behaviors, and motivations.

Cross-cultural teams have an inherent disadvantage. Cultural differences can lead to communication problems, unpredictability, low team cohesion, mistrust, stress, and ultimately poor results. However, cross-cultural teams can, in fact, be very positive entities. Combining different perspectives, viewpoints, and opinions can lead to a better quality of analysis and decision-making, while team members develop new skills in global awareness and intercultural communication.

In reality, this best-case scenario is rarely witnessed. Most of the time, intercultural teams do not develop their potential. The main reason for this is that when you form cross-cultural teams, you bring together people with different frames of understanding and are expected to bond naturally. Without a common framework of understanding, for example on issues like status, decision-making, communication etiquette, this is very difficult and therefore requires outside help to bring the team together.

Intercultural or cross-cultural training is a method to help bring a team together. Through analysis of the cultures involved in a team, their particular approaches to communication and business, and how the team interacts, intercultural team builders can find, suggest, and use common ground to help team members build harmonious relationships. .

Intercultural training sessions seek to help a team realize their differences and similarities in areas such as status, hierarchy, decision-making, conflict resolution, display of emotion, and relationship building. These are then used to create mutually agreed structures of communication and interaction. From this foundation, teams are instructed on how to recognize future communication difficulties and their cultural roots, allowing them to become more self-sufficient. The end result is a more cohesive and productive team.

In conclusion, for cross-cultural teams to be successful, managers and HR staff must be alert to the need for cross-cultural training to help cultivate harmonious relationships. Companies need to be supportive, proactive and innovative if they want to take advantage of the potential benefits that intercultural teams can offer. This goes beyond funding and creating technology linkages to bringing together cross-cultural teams on a surface level and getting back to basics by fostering better interpersonal communication. For international companies to grow and prosper in this ever-shrinking world, cross-cultural synergy must be a priority.