Business Articles Review - Essay Example

In feminine cultures cooperation is more frequent which leads to people seeking the best joint outcome for society. A weakness of feminine culture is that people tend to be naively altruistic and sometimes get taken advantage of. Another negative aspect of feminine is that sometimes the economic expectations of such a society are too low. Participation of women in societies across the globe has increased during the past 60 years. A feminine culture does not necessarily increase the participation of women in economic and social life.

I thought that the article was well written and it pointed out a lot of important arguments in regards to masculinity and feminine. I consider the United States a masculine society. Evidence of this is the fact that there has never been a women president in the history of the United States. Women are still being held back into positions of power by the glass ceiling effect. Despite my opinion that the U.S is a masculine society the article mentions other cultures in the world in which women do not enjoy the same freedoms and rights as in the U.S. In most Arab countries the women are seen as second class citizens.

Men in Arab countries have all the power and women must obey the men at all times. In such a society women seldom hold positions of power such as managerial positions. . Cultural barriers caused communication problems and conflicts and the team was very ineffective. “Cultural differences can create substantial obstacles to effective teamwork-but these may be subtle and difficult to recognize until significant damage has already been done” (Brett, Behfar, Kern, 2006, pg. 86). Work teams are supposed to be self-sufficient and managers should not intervene in interpersonal conflict because doing so is usually counterproductive and wastes valuable managerial time.

It is imperative to avoid single culture approaches to solving problems among multicultural teams. Four types of challenges associated with multicultural teams are direct versus indirect communication, trouble with accents and fluency, differing attitudes toward hierarchy and authority, and conflicting norms for decisions. Some of the most effective strategies identified by the author to deal with conflict are adaptation, structural intervention, managerial intervention, and exit. Teamwork has become more important than ever in the workplace of the 21st century.

Due to the rise of the globalization movement many multinational corporations are exposed to forming multicultural teams as part of the day to day business activities. These teams can bring tremendous benefits to a company because diversity helps foster innovation and creativity. I agree with the author that managerial intervention to solve internal conflict in a team is a strategy that should only be used as a last resort. The multicultural team is supposed to go through the same team formation stages of any team which are forming, storming, norming, and performing. An