Multi-Cultural Teams & Their Leadership - Essay Example

The American, Germans, Italians and Swiss employees working as a team also end up creating situations where the understanding of each other’s culture and strategies to resolve the conflicts is required. This paper aims to highlight the major issues that may hinder the success of such a team.Communication barriers are the first issue that may hinder the success of a multi-cultural team. The Swiss culture is said to have a bilingual culture where French, German, Romansh and Italian are said to be the official languages.

However, the point of debate is the expertise of people in speaking and understanding all these languages. The Swiss culture, hence, lacks communication ease and conformity with all people in an organization or a group. Moreover, there are certain words like “achievement, commitment, common sense …management and skill” which lack the corresponding vocabulary in the German language. Thus, there is also a possibility of miscommunication and misunderstanding due to the language differences in a culturally diverse team.

To overcome this barrier, the leaders and organizations may approach a language learning and training program for the workers. Moreover, the use of soft facial expressions, appropriate tone of voice and continuous reminders of the important tasks may help in reducing the risks associated with the language and communication barrier (Adler 1997).Another problem which the multicultural group of workers can face is on reaching a common consensus. These people belong to different backgrounds and may have different perspectives on different issues.

Thus everyone has his own views and they find it difficult to reach a conclusion on deciding upon certain things. These workers tend to be from diverse backgrounds and disagree on many issues. Multicultural teams have to be managed properly so that they do not face difficulties when reaching this common consensus. These multicultural teams might be facing the problem of miscommunication and the manager should look after this. It is necessary that the manager helps the team to reach a common consensus by providing each and every worker with the necessary information about the other.

The perspectives of the diverse workers are laid together so that every worker can understand it and follow the action plan. Members of a culturally diverse workforce tend to lack trust in each other more than the members of a homogenous workforce. The reason for this is the diversity in the workforce that comes along with the people of different cultures. The team in the superstore is related to all American, Swiss, Italian and German culture and the problem can start when one group of workers consider the other inferior.

Lack of trust can occur when Americans consider people from other cultures to be inferior to them in terms of education and lifestyle. Similarly, the people belonging to the Swiss culture would be more acquainted with the policies of the stores and hence might consider the other people inferior. It is here that the role of the manager comes into play to help them collaborate with each other. Trust can be reinforced if the managers provide the workers time to know each other. The workers should be made to work with each other so that they can get a grasp of each other’s culture.

Halverson and Tirmizi (2008) put forward that trust is a major factor that helps the team members to define the role of each other. Hence it can be concluded that trust is a major factor that can help multicultural workers to get together.Jealousy is also one of the problems that the workers in a multicultural force can face altogether. The people belonging to American, Italian and German culture might be jealous of the people belonging to Swiss culture as they are aware of the workings of the organization.

The workers from Swiss culture would know as to how the market should be targeted and who the target audience is whereas the people from other cultures would know less about it. This would create jealousy amongst the workforce and productivity would rather decrease. I was a leader would propose that the workers from other cultures be acquainted with the local culture so that they get to know about the happenings in the country. The workers would be given more time with the Swiss workforce so that they get to know them better and root out any feeling of jealousy (Adler 1997).

Lastly work stress may cause problems for all the workers in the store. Miscommunication and mistrust amongst the workers can lead to stressful conditions and hence less productivity. The stress can be avoided if the leader helps the workers to communicate and reduces mistrust amongst them. It is necessary that the leader creates a friendly environment in the workplace so that the workers can easily communicate and trust each other (Halverson & Tirmizi 2008; Adler 1997).