MGT5313 Chap.6 Leading Culturally Diverse Teams

Leading Culturally Diverse Teams

Design decisions, not interpersonal skill

A culturally diverse team is not an ordinary team with an extra characteristic. The difference is that defaults a leader would otherwise not notice stop being neutral: the meeting time, the language of record, what counts as a decision and who is expected to speak first. This chapter is therefore about design, and the decisions come in an order.

First, where the work happens, because skipping it means roles get assigned by who is nearest the office rather than by capability. Second, which decisions are synchronous, because skipping it makes the meeting the only channel and hands one site ownership of the clock.

Third, which of the team's norms are the organization's values and which are one site's habits, because skipping it lets a head office practice travel as though it were a company value.

A published design, read as a set of decisions

The reading for this week is a practitioner case study of a large education company serving customers in nearly two hundred countries, and it is useful precisely because it describes decisions rather than theory.

It names no framework at all, so any theory applied to it is yours and has to be declared as yours. Its published split is sixty per cent of the workforce working on a hybrid basis, twenty per cent on remote contracts and twenty per cent office based because of the nature of their roles, which totals one hundred.

The trap in those numbers is that the remote share before the change was also twenty: what grew was hybrid, not remote.

Its instruments are a remote working manifesto crowdsourced on the internal network rather than a policy issued from the centre, a requirement that employees record on the personnel system how much of their time they plan to be on site, performance managed on trust and outputs rather than presence, divisional days held in person, twice a year alongside a monthly discussion series with optional attendance, and team members in a second country joining the home country team virtually.

What the case cannot show

It reports improvements in engagement and retention, in the calibre of recruits given greater geographical reach, and in efficiency.

It gives no figure for any of them, no baseline and no method, and it has no limitations section. That is normal for a practitioner case study and it sets a hard limit: the reading describes a design and cannot demonstrate that the design worked.

Converting an unquantified claim into a percentage is the fastest way to lose the credibility of an otherwise good analysis.

Two mechanisms that operate below intention

Social identity theory sets out how people sort themselves, and everyone else, into social groups, directing attention to in group bias and out group favouritism.

In a team spanning two sites, the sites are available as groups whether or not anyone wants them to be, and the sorting shows up in small allocations rather than in large decisions.

Power distance measures how far a population accepts that power inside its institutions is unequally held, read as the felt distance between staff and the people above them, so where that distance is wide an invitation to challenge a manager in an open forum is not received as an invitation.

Uncertainty avoidance adds a third effect, since a deliberately loose working arrangement reads as freedom in one setting and as an absence of support in another. None of the three is fixed by encouraging people to speak up.

Each is addressed by changing a structure: who is asked directly rather than generally, which decisions are taken in writing, and what is recorded about how a decision will be made before it is made.

Silence, and the line between a value and a habit

An absence of objection is consistent with agreement, with disagreement that is expensive to express, with not having understood, and with a norm that makes contradicting a superior in public inappropriate.

A leader who reports consensus on the strength of silence has reported the acoustics of the meeting. The way out is a channel where the cost of dissent differs, which usually means asking individually, in writing, before the meeting.

The third design decision is harder, because the culture material pulls in two directions at once: build a multinational culture on corporate values unique and separate from identifiable country norms, and understand the cultural relevance of existing norms before introducing plans overseas because a culture may not be transportable. Both are sound and neither says where the line falls.

Drawing it for a specific practice, by stating the value in a form that names no technology or ritual and letting each market propose how it is met, is a complete piece of analysis.

What this chapter covers

• 01

  Three design decisions, and the failure each one prevents

• 02

  A published working mode split, and the share that did not move

• 03

  Manifesto, declared pattern and output based performance as instruments

• 04

  What a practitioner case study can and cannot evidence

• 05

  In group bias and out group favouritism inside a two site team

• 06

  Accepted inequality, and why silence is weak evidence

• 07

  Tolerance for ambiguity, and the same policy read two ways

• 08

  Separating a corporate value from one site's expression of it

Consensus, or the cost of speaking

Key terms

In Group Bias

The tendency to favour members of the group one has assigned oneself to, which in a distributed team operates on the site boundary whether or not anyone intends it.

Hybrid Working

A working pattern splitting time between the employer's premises and elsewhere, distinguished in the published case from a remote contract, which does not require regular attendance.

Asynchronous Decision

A decision taken through written contributions gathered over time rather than in a live meeting, which equalises the cost of contributing across time zones.

Rites Of Contact

The regular low cost gatherings a distributed team runs, distinguished in the published design from the rare high cost gathering such as a twice yearly divisional day.

Leading Culturally Diverse Teams FAQ

Assessment move

List the three design decisions and answer them for a team you have actually worked in, naming who owned each decision and whether it was ever taken explicitly. Most people find that the second and third were never decided at all, which is the point: the failures in this chapter come from defaults rather than from choices, and a recommendation that converts a default into a decision is both cheap and arguable.

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