Multicultural Teams

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Leadership in Science and

Technology: A Reference Handbook

Multicultural Teams

Contributors: Susan R. Fussell & Leslie D. SetlockEditors: William Sims BainbridgeBook Title: Leadership in Science and Technology: A Reference HandbookChapter Title: "Multicultural Teams"Pub. Date: 2012Access Date: August 23, 2014Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.City: Thousand OaksPrint ISBN: 9781412976886

Online ISBN: 9781412994231DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412994231.n29Print pages: 255-264
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Page 3 of 24 Leadership in Science and Technology: A ReferenceHandbook: Multicultural Teams

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Chapter 29: Multicultural Teams

[p. 255 ]

Research and development in science and engineering is often conducted by teams

that are multicultural in membership, in that different members of the team have been

born and raised in a wide variety of nations and regions that are culturally distinct

from one another. For example, an academic research team in the United States is

likely to include researchers from Asia, Europe, South America, and a variety of other

locales in addition to those born in the United States. These multicultural teams canface challenges because people have different norms, values, and expectations about

the role of leadership and how they should interact with one another.

One kind of multicultural team stems from the international nature of the graduate

student population in many countries. In the United States, for example, recent statistics

(Burelli 2010) indicate that in 2009, more than 250,000 foreign students were studying

science and engineering fields, roughly two thirds of which were master's and doctorate

students. A list of the top 10 countries of birth for these students includes 9 with

distinctly different cultures than that of the United States: China, India, South Korea,

Taiwan, Japan, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Mexico. As a result, several academicresearch laboratories are likely to include students, faculty, and postdoctoral fellows

from a broad array of backgrounds. After graduation, some of these students go on to a

faculty or industry research position within the U.S. science and engineering community.

Multicultural science and engineering teams are also increasingly common in virtual

organizations that bring people from around the world together to work on common

problems (DeSanctis and Monge 1998). The power of global virtual organizations lies

in their ability to bring a broad array of expertise and resources to bear on a problem,

to find the best person for a job regardless of his or her location, and to optimize efforts

by working around the clock. Global virtual teams have played an increasingly important

role in research and development, software development, scientific collaboratories,and many other domains (Brockhoff 1998, Olson, Zimmerman, and Bos 2008). In

addition, scientists and engineers are frequently members of international advisory
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boards, conference program committees, and other ad hoc groups that require intensive

interaction among people from different cultures.

Both collocated and virtual multicultural teams face challenges stemming from

differences in cultural background, native language, local resources, and many other

factors (Sanchez-Burks and Lee 2007). Team members may vary in communication

styles (Hall 1976; Sanchez-Burks et al. 2003), norms for interpersonal interactions

(Morris, Podolny, and Sullivan 2008), work processes, and many other ways that

affect how successfully they can interact with one another and with the team leader.

Leaders themselves are shaped by their cultural background, with those from different

backgrounds preferring different leadership styles (House et al. 2004), negotiation

strategies (Adair and Brett 2005), and methods of dealing with conflict (Ting-Toomey etal. 1991; Morris et al. 1998).

Mismatches in social conventions, work styles, power relationships, and conversational

norms can lead to misunderstandings that negatively affect the interaction. For

example, an individual from a task-oriented culture such as the United States or Canada

may focus exclusively on getting things done, overlooking the social niceties expected

by his or her colleagues from relationship-focused cultures such as China, Japan, or

Latin America. Similarly, an individual from a low-context communication culture, who

relies primarily on verbal language to express his or her thoughts, may ignore facial

expressions or tones of voice that are intended to be communicative by a colleague

from a high-context culture. These differences can affect both the success of the project

the team is engaged in and the personal relationships among group members.

[p. 256 ]

People from different cultural backgrounds have been shown to vary in several ways,

which are typically referred to as cultural dimensions. These dimensions of variation

create challenges for key aspects of leadership and teamwork such as interpersonal

communication, coordination and collaboration, negotiation and conflict resolution,

and the development of good working relationships among team members. Leaders of

multicultural groups use several strategies and interventions to address these issues,including cross-cultural training exercises and thoughtful choices of interaction styles

and information technology to be used by the team.
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Types of Cultural VariationCulture can be defined as a set of norms, roles, and values emphasized by a culture

and adopted, to greater or lesser degrees, by membersof that culture through

such processes as imitation and teaching. What this means is that there are central

tendencies to think and behave within a particular culture that can vary from the

tendencies to think and behave in other cultures. Within a given culture, people are

not all the same: Some will adhere closely to the central tendencies of that culture, but

others may think and act differently. Nonetheless, the population of that culture as a

whole can be said to possess certain characteristics that are often distinct from those of

other cultures.

Although researchers agree that cultures differ in many ways, they have debated

exactly how culture should be defined and the specific dimensions along which cultures

vary (Hofstede 1983; Schwartz 1992; Triandis 1995). Four key dimensions of cultural

variation will be presented in this chapter: individualism versus collectivism, high

versus low context of communication, task versus relationship focus, and power

distance. These are the most commonly referenced dimensions as established by

cultural research and especially pertinent to leadership and teamwork in science and

engineering. It should be noted that cultural background is not the only important way

in which members of a team vary. Other factors also influence people's behavior,including their personal characteristics, demographic factors such as gender and age,

and organizational culture. The cultural dimensions discussed in this section add yet

another source of variation, one with which many leaders may be less familiar.

Individualism versus Collectivism

Many culture theories distinguish between individualistic and collectivistic cultures. In

individualistic cultures such as that of the United States or Germany, people tend to

identify themselves first and foremost as individuals, with the primary goal of personal

gain. In collectivistic cultures such as those found in many Asian and Latin American

countries, people tend to identify themselves as a member of a larger collective and


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focus on the betterment of that collective (Triandis 1995; Hofstede 2001). For example,

a student from an individualistic culture might choose a college major based on what

interested him or her most, or what might lead to the most profitable career. Once

successful in that career, his or her achievement would be attributed primarily to

individual traits, such as hard work, creativity, and discipline. In contrast, a student from

a collectivistic culture might choose a major based on what would be most beneficial to

his or her immediate family and close relatives, regardless of his or her own interest or

individual gain. Achievements would reflect on his or her parents and other family as

much as, or more than, his or her individual qualities.

Whether someone is from an individualistic or collectivistic cultural background has

far-reaching effects, influencing his or her cognitive processes (Nisbett 2003) and hisor her self-concept as either independent of or interdependent with other individuals

(Markus and Kitayama 1991). In addition, Geert H. Hofstede's (2001) analyses of

survey responses from IBM employees around the world show that cultural tendencies

toward individualism versus collectivism are associated with many aspects of daily life,

including business practices, child raising, and educational techniques.

High-Versus Low-Context Communication

Another way that cultures have been argued to differ is in the strategies membersuse to communicate. Edward T. Hall (1976) distinguished between low context

communication, which is verbally explicit and to the point, with relatively little attempt

to mask one's feelings, and high-context communication, which is indirect, often

ambiguous, and sensitive to the specific situational context (e.g., the relationship

between speaker and addressee, nuances of facial expressions or tone of voice). Low-

context communication is typical of the United States, Canada, and many (but not all)

European countries, whereas high-context communication is typical of many Asian,

South American, and Middle Eastern countries.

Low- and high-context communication styles can be dramatically different for certain

types of messages. For example, low-context communicators are likely to expressdisagreement outright (e.g., no, I think ), whereas high-context communicators

may use silence or indirect speech (e.g., moving on to another topic) to indicate


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disagreement. In addition, low-context communicators are likely to express their

disagreement in the same way regardless of the setting of the conversation (e.g., work

versus home and peers versus superiors), whereas high-context communicators adjust

their communication to the specific people, places, and purposes of the conversation.

Although people in all cultures use both communicationstyles to some extent, research

suggests that low-context communication is preferred in individualistic societies [p. 257

] such as the United States and Canada and high-context communication is preferred

in collectivistic societies, particularly Asian cultures (Gudykunst, Ting-Toomey, and

Chua 1988; Gudykunst et al. 1996).

Task versus Relationship FocusA third way that cultures have been argued to differ is in the orientation they take toward

the task at hand (Triandis 1995). Task-oriented cultures focus on getting work done in

a timely and efficient way, whereas relationship-oriented cultures focus on establishing

rapport with one's partners in addition to task completion. In task-oriented teamwork,

conversations revolve around the work itself and how to get it done. The exchange of

social pleasantries would be considered a diversion. In relationship-oriented cultures,

however, these social pleasantries are fundamental to the relationship goals of the

interaction.

This difference in task versus relationship orientation may lead to misunderstandings

and misattributions in collaborative work. When individuals from task-oriented cultures

fail to attend to relationship factors, they may be perceived as rude by their teammates

from relationship-oriented cultures; when individuals from relationship-oriented cultures

fail to focus exclusively on the task at hand, they may be perceived as undedicated by

their teammates from task-oriented cultures. The task versus relationship focus is only

quasi-independent of the other dimensions. Individualistic cultures such as the United

States, Canada, and Australia tend to use low-context communication styles and have

a task orientation. Collectivistic cultures such as Japan and China tend to use high-

context communication styles and to have a relationship orientation.


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High-Versus Low-Power DistanceFinally, cultures vary in the ways the power dynamics that hold between leaders or

supervisors and the people who work for them. Power distance refers to the extent to

which members of an organization expect and tolerate an unequal distribution of power

based on the formal hierarchy of the organization (Hofstede 1983). For instance, in a

low-power-distance culture, workers would expect access to their superiors and would

expect to have a voice in decisions made by management that affect them. In a high-

power-distance structure, workers expect management to function over their heads

and expect different privileges for higher-level workers even beyond those specifically

associated with the job.

Hofstede's research has shown considerable variation across nations and cultures

in power distance. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, for

example, are considered to be low-power-distance cultures. Workers expect some

unequal distribution of power and privilege, but they expect to have some degree

of representation or access to superiors as well. Many work teams have a relatively

flat structure in which anyone can suggest goals, strategies, or tasks for the team to

achieve. In contrast, many Asian and Latin American cultures have a rather high-power-

distance culture, where workers expect that their management will make decisions, and

that they have to accept and act on those decisions. Members of work teams have littleopportunity for input and do not expect to have this input.

Summary

Cultures vary along several dimensions including individualism-collectivism, high-versus

low-context communication, task versus relationship focus, and low-versus high-power

distance. Although researchers debate about how many dimensions there are, and how

important each one is, these four dimensions have a large body of research to support

them. The next section presents a model of how variation along these dimensions can

influence important aspects of leadership and teamwork.


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Effects of Cultural Diversity on TeamworkThe cultural dimensions discussed in the previous section, alone and in combination,

can influence many important aspects of teamwork including interpersonal

communication, task coordination, the establishment of working relationships,

and negotiation and conflict resolution. This section briefly describes how cultural

differences can affect each of these processes.

Interpersonal Communication

Most successful teamwork relies on leaders and team members being able to

communicate clearly with one another. This process can be hampered by cultural

differences in communication styles, particularly those between low-context

communicators who rely on explicit messages and high-context communicators who

rely on the context to make their meaning clear. One area in which problems have

been identified in multicultural teams is that of conversational grounding,or to the way

people interact to ensure that they understand one another's messages (Clark and

Brennan 1991). During conversational grounding, speakers and listeners ask each

other questions, provide clarifications, rephrase one another's messages, and work

together in other ways to ensure that messages are understood properly. Grounding isparticularly efficient when people share community comemberships, including shared

membership in a wider culture.

Cultures vary in their strategies for grounding conversations; that is, they exert different

effort into the grounding process and use different mechanisms for grounding. Han

Z. Li (1999) examined whether the effort pairs put into ensuring that messages were

properly understood [p. 258 ] differed as a function of whether both members of

the pair were born and raised in Canada, both were born and raised in the People's

Republic of China, or one was from Canada and one was from China. Although both

Canadian-born and Chinese-born pairs spent about the same amount of time talking

during a task, the amount of talk was correlated with comprehension of the material the

speaker was trying to convey only for the Canadian pairs. Li concludes that although


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grounding behaviors may be similar in Canadian and Chinese dyads, the purpose of

this grounding activity differs: For Chinese dyads, it is associated with relationship

building where as for Canadian dyads it improves information exchange.

Theorists have suggested that grounding in cross-cultural conversations may be

especially problematic because of differences in background knowledge (minimal

community comembership) and differences in conversational styles. Li found that cross-

cultural pairs in which a Chinese individual was the listener spent less effort ensuring

that messages were properly grounded (e.g., requesting clarification and expanding on

initial formulations) than cross-cultural pairs in which a U.S. individual was the listener.

Canadian listeners assumed that their job was to draw out the information from their

partner. Chinese listeners, coming from a more high-context style, assumed that theirpartner was already telling them whatever they intended to share. In Li's study, the

communication task involved the exchange of medical information between a person

playing a doctor and a person playing a patient. In the cases where communication was

unsuccessful, the patientdid not understand what the doctor was telling him or her. If

similar misunderstandings arise in real doctor-patient conversations, there might be

serious repercussions.

Cultural differences in communication processes also have bearing on the suitability

of different computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools for team interaction. For

example, members of high-context cultures that rely heavily on the situational context

of communication may be more disadvantaged by text-based media such as instant

messaging (IM) or e-mail than members of low-context cultures that rely predominantly

on the words exchanged. Being able to see and hear a conversational partner is more

important for grounding in high-context cultures than in low-context cultures because

awareness of how others are reacting to one's messages is an important aspect of high-

context communication (Hall 1976). Similarly, because auditory and visual cues can be

important for establishing rapport, CMC tools that eliminate these cues are likely to be

more disruptive to communication in relationship-oriented cultures than in task-oriented

cultures. Empirical studies have demonstrated that, in cross-cultural interactions, the

combination of these culturally bound communication traits can impact both the social

and task-related effectiveness of the interaction (Gudykunst, Ting-Toomey, and Chua

1988; Pekerti and Thomas 2003).


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Task CoordinationCultural differences can also affect how well teams can coordinate to achieve their

goals. Although some science and engineering tasks can be done individually, other

work requires the timely and appropriate exchange or aggregation of information,

materials, and other artifacts. As such, coordination in terms of setting shared deadlines

and determining who will provide what by these deadlines is essential. As Thomas

W. Malone and Kevin Crowston (1994) have pointed out, there are different ways this

coordination can be achieved. One way is through ongoing communication, in which

leaders and team members keep each other informed as to what needs to be done,

what they are doing, time estimates, and other key aspects of coordination. Goodcommunication can go a long way toward improving coordination, but the challenges

of establishing mutual understanding in multicultural teams suggest that leaders should

not rely solely on communication as their coordination strategy.

Leaders and teams can also achieve coordination with relatively little communication

if they share a common understanding or mental model of the work (Mohammed and

Dumville 2001). In a work setting, these mental models encompass such elements as

role assignments, power and status hierarchies, team procedures, and the external

working environment. When team members share mental models, they can anticipate

in advance what the team's goals and tasks are, what they themselves need to do, andwhat their colleagues will do (Cannon-Bowers, Salas, and Converse 1993).

A challenge for multicultural teams is that people may come to the project with different

mental models of team structures and processes. For example, cultures high in power

distance may expect leaders to take the initiative for all group activities, whereas

cultures lower along this dimension may expect all team members to show initiative.

Cultural differences in mental models of time-related phenomena have also been found;

some cultures believe that deadlines and meeting times are meant to be precisely

observed, and other cultures believe that these are at best rough guidelines that one

may or may not follow.


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Working RelationshipsAll the cultural differences discussed in the previous section can have a negative effect

on the development of pleasant and positive working relationships among members

of multicultural teams. In part, these problems arise because people from different

cultures have differing expectations of what these working relationships should entail.

For many individuals from task-oriented cultures, a good working relationship means

that people can work together successfully to get the task done. However, individuals

from relationship-oriented cultures may expect a closer personal connection with their

colleagues.

[p. 259 ]

Research suggests that when team members come from cultures that prioritize

relationship development, they not surprisingly devote greater effort within an interaction

to building up relationships. Even when engaged in a task-focused activity, Chinese

team members devote more effort to explicit relationship building than U.S. team

members (Li 1999; Setlock, Fussell, and Neuwirth 2004). This can be observed in a

variety of aspects of the interaction, including the exchange of biographical information

(getting to know each other), attentiveness to the partner's opinions on the matter at

hand (e.g., explicitly asking a partner what he or she thinks), and the use of relationalcommunication strategies. Although such behaviors may be viewed positively by other

members of relationship-focused cultures, they are sometimes viewed as a distraction

or annoyance by members of task-focused cultures.

Work relationships can also be influenced by the manner of speech colleagues use

with one another. Relational aspects of communication are concerned not with what

information is conveyed but with howthat information is conveyed and what this

indicates about the relationship between speaker and addressee(s). For example,

nonverbal cues such as eye gaze, facial expressions, and posture can be used to

express intimacy, trust, and attraction. In addition, the verbal content of messages

can be crafted in different ways to establish, maintain, and/or build closeness with (orto maintain or increase distance from) a partner. Speakers decisions about forms of


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address, informal versus formal language, use of swear words, and so on can all have

implications for their relationships with their addressees.

Cultural theorists suggest that high-context, relationship-oriented cultures place more

emphasis on relational communication than do low-context, task-oriented cultures

(Ting-Toomey et al. 1991). One area in which this hypothesis has been tested is that

of conversational indirectness. People can ask others to do things in a variety of ways,

including direct commands (e.g., take out the trash),indirect requests (e.g., would you

mind terribly taking out the trash?),and off-record statements (e.g., it's terribly messy in

here).In general, when requests are less direct, they are perceived to be more polite.

Many cross-cultural studies look at Asian cultures, such as Korea or China, which use

low-context communication, with western cultures such as the United States, UnitedKingdom, and Canada, which use high-context communication. Studies examining

conversational indirectness have shown that speakers from high-context cultures such

as China and Korea use more indirectness than those from low-context cultures such

as the United States (Ambady et al. 1996; Holtgraves 1997). Chinese speakers are also

more likely than U.S. speakers to use language that promotes relationship building,

such as wepronouns and social language, both face-to-face and via IM (Setlock et

al. 2004). These mismatches in use of relational language may be one reason that

members of intercultural pairs rate one another less positively than members of same

culture pairs.

Negotiation and Conflict Resolution

In any kind of teamwork, disagreements will arise among team members and between

team members and outside groups and organizations, which need to be resolved via

negotiation and conflict resolution. These disagreements can be resolved in a variety

of ways, ranging from techniques that try to build consensus to techniques that try to

get one's own way forcibly. The cultural background of leaders and managers from

different cultures has been shown to shape their preferences among these negotiation

tactics (Ting-Toomey et al. 1991; Adair and Brett 2005). Leaders from collectivistic,

high-context cultures typically prefer relational strategies involving compromise and

the identification of shared priorities, whereas leaders from individualistic, low-context

culture typically prefer informational strategies such as formal argumentation and verbal


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domination of the conversation. These differences have been attributed to cultural

variation in concern for one's own face versus the other person's face (Ting-Toomey

1988).

The effectiveness of a leader's own preferred styles of negotiation and conflict

resolution will vary depending on the cultural background of the people with whom he or

she is negotiating. People who share a cultural background also share preferences for

certain types of negotiation strategies such as compromising versus dominating (Ting-

Toomey et al. 1991; Adair and Brett 2005) that may make them more effective with

partners of their own culture versus another culture.

The considerations outlined previously can make negotiation and conflict resolutionvery tricky for leaders interacting in an intercultural sphere. While leaders can learn new

styles of negotiation, that alone may not suffice because members of other cultures may

deem it inappropriate for them to use relational strategies. In other words, the norms

as they would apply to a same-culture manager do not translate to an other-culture

manager, who is perceived to be in a different role (Hofstede 1983). In addition, within

the leader's own team, it would be difficult to adjust one's negotiation style to meet the

norms and expectations of every group member.

Summary

Cultural diversity introduces many challenges for leadership and teamwork in science

and engineering teams. The cultural background of leaders and team members can

influence important aspects of teamwork, including interpersonal communication,

coordination of task activities, negotiation and conflict resolution, and the establishment

of good working relationships. When there are problems in any of these areas of

teamwork, both task-oriented and [p. 260 ] relationship-oriented outcomes can

suffer. Teams may not be able to conduct their research and development activities

in a timely fashion, and team members may come to resent one another. The next

section describes some strategies leaders and managers can use to overcome these

challenges.


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Overcoming Challenges to LeadingCulturally Diverse Teams

Leaders and managers can take several steps to address the challenges of directing

multicultural science and engineering teams. First, they can provide training, and

become trained themselves, about cultural differences. With greater awareness of

these differences, there can be greater understanding of one another's perspectives,

values, and expectations on group work. Awareness of cultural differences also allows

leaders to make good choices about the mechanics of teamwork in their teams, such

as choosing interaction styles and information technology that minimize the potentialinfluences of cultural differences.

Training

One valuable approach to improving leadership and teamwork in multicultural science

and engineering teams is through cultural training (Littrell and Salas 2005). There are

two general categories of training: culture-specific training and diversity awareness

training. Culture-specific training is often tailored to people who expect to spend

significant time in a foreign culture. The goal is for trainees to be familiar with the norms,values, customs, expectations, and other key behavioral patterns of a specific culture.

Diversity training is meant to heighten people's appreciation for the fact that certain

norms and values vary across cultures and provide people with cultural intelligencethat

allows them to interact successfully with people from a broad array of cultures (Earley

and Ang 2003). In most cases, leaders will want to provide a little of both: enough

diversity training for people to learn to think reflectively about cultural differences, and

then some culture-specific training on the specific cultural groups represented in their

team.

A goal of diversity training is to observe the potential role of culture, in general, and

identify points in the interaction or scenario where differing cultural backgrounds could

lead to differing interpretations of the situation, communication, or possibilities for

action. The individual need not know a colleague's specific cultural framework but
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will instead be more likely to look to differences in perspective (rather than ability,

cooperativeness, etc.) as a contributing factor in conflicts or confusion, creating a more

positive group outlook.

For culture-specific training, a variety of educational methods has been used, including

tutors, classes, immersive experiences, and text-based exercises. Although immersion

is generally considered the most successful, it is also the least feasible for most

collaborative teams, as it would require people to spend significant time living and

working within the cultures of each of their collaborators. Today, virtual worlds such as

Second Life or World of Warcraft offer more feasible ways to achieve virtual immersion

in foreign cultures. One might spend extended time in parts of these worlds populated

predominantly by members of another culture, such as the virtual Tokyo section ofSecond Life, or serve in an international guild in World of Warcraft. Language barriers

remain a problem for virtual immersion, but new tools such as Google Translate may

eventually be accurate enough to support smooth interlingual communication.

Attribution training, based on a series of text-based exercises, is a more feasible

method to teach individuals to evaluate situations and behavior from another culture's

point of view. The notion behind attribution training is that by providing people with

a cognitive framework for understanding the behavior of people from other cultures,

people can learn to make appropriate attributions for these behaviors rather than

interpreting them in light of their own culture.

One popular type of attribution training is cultural assimilators(Cushner and Brislin

1996). Cultural assimilators consist of a set of stories situated within a specific culture,

followed by multiple-choice questions whose answers offer alternative explanations

(attributions) for the event. After choosing an answer, readers are then provided with

the correct answer as well as with explanations for why that answer is correct and each

of the other alternatives is incorrect. For example, a reader might be presented with

a scenario in which a team member from a particular culture fails to speak up after

observing the group leader making a critical mistake. Among the options for attributions

for this event might be that it is culturally inappropriate to challenge the leader under

any circumstances. In general, culture assimilators can facilitate learning about othercultures and reduce people's uncertainty in intercultural interactions (Mitchell et al.

1972).


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Cultural training by way of assimilators can be valuable for leaders of U.S. science and

engineering teams. However, despite the many training books available, it can be hard

for a leader to find the precise questions that would be useful for his or her team. It can

be necessary to develop new scenarios with the help of members of the target cultures

that are tailored specifically to the research environment. Leaders should also keep in

mind that the foreign members of the team may need similar training to understand U.S.

culture. In an interview study of foreign students studying at a U.S. university, Leslie

D. Setlock and Susan R. Fussell (2010) found that these foreign students reported

feeling anxiety based on their lack of knowledge of what was considered appropriate

and inappropriate in their host country.

Team Interaction Strategies

A second strategy that leaders can take is to address the challenges of leading

multicultural groups to make informed [p. 261 ] choices about group collaboration

strategies that reduce the impact of cultural differences. Leaders have considerable

leeway to identify preferred strategies of interaction within the team and to adjust

these as needed to accommodate cultural differences. For instance, they can decide

what balance of formal meetings versus informal interaction they want to rely on for

team coordination. They can also choose between highly structured processes for

group meetings (e.g., a clear agenda with speakers identified for each segment ofthe meeting) and less structured interactions in which team members contribute as

they see fit. An added benefit of making team interaction strategies explicit is that this

explicitness can help members who came to the team with different mental models of

teamwork develop a common understanding of roles, power and status hierarchies, and

team procedures that they can rely on for future coordination.

In some cases, leaders may also want to implement special procedures to address

cultural issues. For example, as discussed previously, people from high-power-

distance cultures may be reluctant to disagree with leaders in public, even when such

disagreement could be valuable to team progress. To address this issue, a leader might

provide an anonymous way to contribute to team discussions. Similarly, when trying

to generate group consensus, a leader of a team with members from cultures wherein

disagreement is typically indicated by silence rather than overt statements might want


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to implement a decision-making system that requires people (possibly anonymously) to

indicate yes or no. There are no simple rules for deciding which interaction strategies

will work best; rather, the leader needs to take into account the cultural backgrounds of

the members of his or her team.

Appropriate Collaboration Tools

In many science and engineering teams today, significant proportions of the

communication and task work occur via information technology. As with team

dynamics, leaders will want to consider the different needs of people from other cultural

backgrounds when choosing IT for team interaction.

One important consideration is whether a technology facilitates communication across

cultural boundaries. For some multicultural teams, text-based tools such as e-mail or

IM that afford reviewing others messages over time and revising one's own responses

as they are being produced (Clark and Brennan 1991) can be preferable to real-time

tools such as audio or video conferencing. These tools are valuable because they

allow team members extra time to process others messages. Indeed, some studies

have found that cultural differences in communication styles are much smaller in text-

based media in comparison with richer media (Setlock et al. 2004). At the same time,

however, these leaner media do not support high-context communication well becausemany situational aspects of communication have been removed. It can be hard for high-

context communicators to gauge listeners responses when they cannot see or hear

them.

Interviews with foreign students currently enrolled in U.S. schools have also found that

interviewees from relationship-oriented cultures such as China and Korea report giving

more thought to how their media choices may affect interpersonal relationships and

what social norms or expectations may be involved in the choice (Setlock and Fussell

2010). For example, Asian students mentioned that they were reluctant to drop by a

professor's office without establishing previously via e-mail or IM that this would be

acceptable, whereas U.S.-born students felt that this behavior was perfectly acceptable.
http://knowledge.sagepub.com/http://www.sagepub.com/


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Susan R.Fussell Leslie D.Setlock

References and Further Readings

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Brockhoff, Klaus. 1998. Internationalization of Research and Development . New York:

Springer-Verlag.

Burelli, Joan. 2010. Foreign Science and Engineering Students in the United States .

Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation.

Cannon-Bowers, Janis A. EduardoSalas Sharolyn A.Converse 1993. Shared Mental

Models in Expert Team Decision Making. 22146 in Individual and Group Decision

Making: Current Issues , edited by N. J. Castellan, Jr., ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence

Erlbaum.

Clark, Herbert H. Susan E.Brennan 1991. Grounding in Communication. 12749 in

Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition , edited by L. B. Resnick, ed. , R. M. Levine,

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Cushner, Kenneth Richard W.Brislin 1996. Intercultural Interactions: A Practical Guide .

Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452204970

DeSanctis, Gerardine PeterMonge Communication Processes for Virtual

Organizations. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 1998 3 (4).

Earley, P. Christopher SoonAng 2003. Cultural Intelligence: An Analysis of IndividualInteractions across Cultures . Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
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Fowler, Sandra M., ed. and Monica G. Mumford, eds. 1995. Intercultural Sourcebook:

Cross-Cultural Training Methods , vol. 1. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press.

Gudykunst, William B. YukoMatsumoto StellaTing-Toomey TsukasaNishida

KwangsuKim SamHeyman The Influence of Cultural Individualism-Collectivism, Self

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Gudykunst, William B. StellaTing-Toomey ElizabethChua 1988. Culture and

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Hall, Edward T. 1976. Beyond Culture . New York: Doubleday Anchor.

Hofstede, Geert H. 1983. Dimensions of National Cultures in Fifty Countries and

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Holtgraves, Thomas Joong-NamYang Interpersonal Underpinnings of Request

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Personality and Social Psychology 1992 62: 24656.

House, Robert J., ed. , Paul J. Hanges, ed. , Mansour Javidan, ed. , and Peter W.

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Li, Han Z. Grounding and Information Communication in Intercultural and Intracultural

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Littrell, Lisa N. EduardoSalas Kathleen P.Hess MichaelPaley SharonRiedel Expatriate

Preparation: A Critical Analysis of 25 Years of Cross-Cultural Training Research.

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Malone, Thomas W. KevinCrowston The Interdisciplinary Study of Coordination. ACM

Computing Surveys 1994 26: 87119.

Markus, Hazel Rose ShinobuKitayama Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition,

Emotion, and Motivation. Psychological Review 1991 20: 56879.

Mitchell, Terence R. Dennis L.Dossett Fred E.Fiedler Harry C.Triandis Culture Training:

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Mohammed, Susan Brad C.Dumville Team Mental Model in a Team Knowledge

Framework: Expanding Theory and Measurement across Disciplinary Boundaries.Journal of Organizational Behavior 2001 22: 89106.

Morris, Michael W. JoelPodolny BilianNi Sullivan Culture and Coworker Relations:

Interpersonal Patterns in American, Chinese, German, and Spanish Divisions of a

Global Retail Bank. Organizational Science 2008 19: 51732.

Morris, Michael W. Katherine Y.Williams KwokLeung RichardLarrick M.Teresa Mendoza

DeeptiBhatnagar JianfengLi MariKondo Jin-LianLuo Jun-ChenHu Conflict Management

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Think Differently and Why . New York: Free Press.


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Olson, Gary M. AnnZimmerman NathanBos 2008. Scientific Collaboration on the

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Handbook of Cultural Psychology , edited by S. Kitayama, ed. and D. Cohen, ed. . New

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Sanchez-Burks, Jeffrey FionaLee IncheolChoi RichardNisbett ShumingZhao JasookKoo

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Theoretical Advances and Empirical Tests in 20 Countries. 165 in Advances in

Experimental Social Psychology , vol. 25, edited by M. Zanna, ed. . New York:

Academic Press.

Setlock, Leslie D. Susan R.Fussell 2010. What's It Worth to You? The Costs and

Affordances of CMC Tools to Asian and American Users. 34149 in Proceedings of the

CSCW 2010 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work . New York: ACM.

Setlock, Leslie D. Susan R.Fussell ChristineNeuwirth 2004. Taking It Out of Context:

Collaborating within and across Cultures in Face-to-Face Settings and via Instant

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Ting-Toomey, Stella. 1988. Intercultural Conflict Styles: A Face-Negotiation Theory.

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Ting-Toomey, Stella GeGao PaulaTrubisky ZhizhongYang HakSoo Kim Sung-LingLinTsukasaNishida Culture, Face Maintenance, and Styles of Handling Interpersonal


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Documents

Multicultural Teams