With the development of globalization, people live in an increasingly culturally dissimilar world. The changing environment forces international companies to re-construct their strategies and tens of thousands of people leave their countries for better education, career, and life opportunities. In the context, not only international companies but also domestic firms have no other options except hiring people from diverse cultures. It has become a usual phenomenon that a growing number of people with diverse cultural backgrounds exist in different organisations. The activities of human beings are heavily influenced by culture on various levels, e.g. individuals, nations and organizations, the influence of which also takes actions in investments trades and further relationships (Crossman, Bordia & Mills 2010).
Organizational culture is one of the most important elements to achieve success. Defined by Barney (1986), organizational culture could be considered as the integration of value, belief, assumption, and symbols, and leads the development of a firm - to define its relevant employees, customers, suppliers, competitors, and related key factors. Brett, Behfar & Kern (2006) argued that multi-cultural groups usually fall into troubles on management.
It would likely be difficult to refuse this opinion, and, definitely, this opinion makes good sense in some views. Cultural differences can leads to loss of productivity and can have negative impact on company moral. It is imperative that leaders need to learn more about how to manage a team with cultural differences.
Not everyone has the skills in interacting with colleagues from other cultures, and language barrier would be one direct example that prevents communication and increase difficulties for related management issues. Language is a crucial factor to be regarded as providing accurate information to people, and if narrow the consideration to multi-cultural communication and understanding, language barrier is extremely enlarged into the situation that could not be ignored (Meadows 1991). Clausen (2007) stated that the difficulty of communication increases rapidly while speaking different language and coming from different culture backgrounds.
As my personal experience, I had ever worked with a multi-cultural team for a study program in my college, and the students from China, South Korea, and India constituted the team. During the first one or two weeks, it was really difficult for us to work together, since we needed to communicate with each other in English, which was not the native language for all of us, and definitely the diverse English ascent had become an unsolvable trouble for a while time – a whiteboard then became the most important communicating tool.
Obviously, language barrier is only one fundamental element and there are quite a few similar factors to influence the communication in multi-cultural team, such as religion, belief, and education background. At this stage, we would say Brett, Behfar & Kern (2006)’s perspective could be extensively approved.
We are not able to avoid management troubles for a team, and multi-cultural groups often generate frustrating management dilemmas. We fully understand that the troubles sometimes lead to disasters. However, nothing is absolute. This one-sided viewpoint has limited the excavation of benefit of multi-cultural team. There are evidences to indicate that multi-cultural teams can generate creative and innovative ideas.
Under multi-cultural environments, people can create infinite possibilities. Cultural diversity can increase creativity since people from different culture have differences in experiences, mental models, models of perception, information processing, and approaches to problems (Stahl et al. 2010). Based on different cultural backgrounds group members have accumulated more experience to evaluate problems, it should bring fresh ideas and new approaches to problem solving. There is one belief that multicultural team works better than mono-cultural team especially in the situation that multiple skills and judgment are required (Godfrey Ochieng & Price 2009).
Return to my own case – the multi-cultural team for study program. Although the language barrier increased troubles for communication and related management issues, the benefits that we gained from this kind of multi-cultural composition were also obvious. Two Chinese students including me had management background, the logic and systematic theory of which helped us construct a promising framework, and the Indian guy studying in School of Software took charge of all coding tasks for our group while the domestic Korean girls obtained empirical data from several local Korean firms effectively. In this case, everyone was assigned to the fittest task to enlarge their abilities.
It is promising that multi-cultural team provides the opportunity to create a flexible and open environment for management, where managers would be easy to activate the creativity of team members and construct a cooperative model to deal with team targets.
As we mentioned, multi-cultural team would be more and more common in the future, and how to manage multi-cultural team would become an emergent problem for human resource management. Aiming to provide some thoughts to improve work efficiency and help manager better construct and develop multi-cultural teams, we attempted to learn the challenges faced in multi-cultural teams. Behfar, Kern & Brett (2006) asserted that learning the cultural orientations of team members or the behaviors that reflect norms in their motherland would lead to their preferred activities in group process. In another word, team development affords great opportunities to make team member know each other, especially for the diverse culture of team members.
Our experience would not be an entire success case, but we do explore benefits from our team development. After nearly one-month period, we started to know the difference between China, South Korea, and India. As an example, while working, Chinese would highlight the rules, e.g. to follow existing approaches or to limit tasks in a controllable scope, and Korean prefers to follow the leaders although we do not have a “real” leader at that time. That Indian IT guy was smart and seemed to find a balance between Chinese and Korean culture – I would say the balance was based on the understanding on other cultures.
At this stage, we conditionally agree that multi-cultural teams would face management troubles. However, we define these troubles as a kind of challenge, which provides opportunities to upgrade the capability of existed teams. Since we would not be able to avoid multi-cultural conflicts and fusions in the globalization age, we need to seek approaches to utilize this challenge and transfer it as a potential capability for multi-cultural teams.
This paper proposed a critical analysis on the argument that “multi-cultural teams often generate frustrating management dilemmas (Brett, Behfar & Kern 2006).” I, in some sense, agreed with this perspective since a bunch of impact factors underlay in multi-cultural team holds capability to influence efficient management, e.g. language barrier, religion, and education background. However, I highlighted the flexible and open management environment in multi-cultural team and thought it as a combination of opportunities and challenges for creativity and sustainable development. Moreover, one of my own cases was introduced to demonstrate both views. At the end, I provided some thoughts on understanding the challenges derived from multi-cultural teams, which would likely be a breakpoint for the improvement of multi-cultural team management.

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