Optimizing multicultural teams

Traditional models of multicultural R&D collaboration fail to draw most effectively on individual team members’ skills and experiences. Jeanne Brett, a professor of dispute resolution and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, thinks the key to multicultural teams is coexistence of differences and meaningful participation.

In Cultural Intelligence in Global Teams, she explains how she has observed that most multicultural teams collaborate in one of two ways. In the dominant coalition model, there might be a minority group or even a single person who directs the team’s decision making. Brett explains: “We saw how that model shut out certain members of the team who had contributions to make.”

Alternatively, the integration model requires team members to sublimate the identity of their own cultural groups to that of the entire team. However, members might yield some of their their tendency to think differently in the interests of unity.

Brett asserts that the team leader should undertake formal interventions to balance the power equation. Such interventions might encourage more questioning among team members. Alternatively, the leader might appoint individuals or subgroups to work on a particular problem independently and then share their solutions with the entire team.

Brett also believes that one of the ways to get people to participate is to make the size of the groups smaller, and to seed each small group with someone who is likely to support the team member who has not been participating.

To maintain its creativity as its tasks change, the team should continually reconstitute the subgroups.

What makes a successful research team?

The availability of online databases containing millions of papers, as well as analytical tools from network science have turbo-charged studies of collaboration patterns among researchers. These studies typically try to answer the question: "How do you assemble a network and figure out where to plug in your ideas to get the best return?"

A recent article by John Whitfield in Nature summarizes the researchers' tentative tips on what their work reveals:

• If you team up with someone from another institution (of equal or higher tier to your own), the resulting papers are more highly cited than if you team with someone from your own institution.

• If you specialize and work mostly with people in your own field, or you become a big generalist and work with people in a wide range of fields, you get highly cited papers. But in the middle (people who work with an intermediate number of other fields) you get less successful papers.

• In large interdisciplinary groups, the more diverse they were, the less productive they were, but groups where the authors had previous papers together were much more successful than others.

• Large collaborations (say a team of around 20) were more successful if they had a high rate of turnover, but small groups (say 3 to 4) were more successful if they were stable. But stable small groups tend to publish lower impact papers over time.

Research is increasingly collaborative

A recent study at the Kellogg School of Management by Brian Uzzi shows that high impact research is now more likely to arise from large, distributed teams. Published in the journal Science, the study says though that the benefits of this evolution are concentrated largely among the nation’s most elite universities.

The authors examined thirty years worth of the publications tracked by the Institute for Scientific Information’s Web of Science. Multi-school collaborations were relatively rare in 1975. Over the thirty years that followed, multi-school collaborations grew steadily to account for 35 percent of publications in 2005.

The authors found that multi-school collaborations are more likely among the top universities. Lower tier schools, where research isn't cited as often, participated in only 18 percent of multi-school collaborations. Top schools where research is cited more often, participated in 60 percent of multi-school collaborations.

The authors noted that single-author papers have become increasingly rare, down from roughly 30 to 10 percent for science, 60 to 40 percent for social science.

Entrepreneur as a change agent

When we say the word “entrepreneur” at the university, everyone immediately thinks we are referring to someone in the business school, technology transfer office or a start-up company.

So we avoid saying the word - - - - - - - - - - - -, until later in the conversation. It gets in the way of discussions we like to have about the potential of entrepreneurship as a lever for creating positive change, which most people at the university, especially students, embrace.

We think there is an eager audience for education focused on understanding and developing entrepreneurial behaviors, skills and attributes in many different contexts. Business is just one context. Others are social and creative.

The essence of entrepreneurship lies in creating and exploiting opportunities and pursuing innovation in practice. This involves learning, often by trial and error, how to design organizations of all kinds in different contexts and how to operate them successfully.

Universities are moving towards a more holistic concept of entrepreneurship, transcending the pure business focus.

We admire how the University of Rochester is equipping its students across the university to be successful in that regard. According to an AAC&U article “Building a Better Entrepreneurial Education,” it is aggressively fostering entrepreneurial skills in fields like education, engineering, nursing, and music—and in the business department, too. Courses in entrepreneurship are found in six schools on campus. The goal is to foster leadership, management, and team-building qualities.

Rochester’s brand of entrepreneurship is the “transformation of an idea into an enterprise that creates value—economic, social, cultural, or intellectual.” It focuses very little on the profit portion of the field.

In the AAC&U article, Vice Provost for Entrepreneurship Duncan Moore proudly points out: “Most of the projects being proposed by the students are not around business entrepreneurship, but social entrepreneurship,” he says.

“If we want to be sure our students will have a long career…they should have either international or entrepreneurial experiences," Moore says. “That’s not going to get outsourced.”

Next time you hear the word “entrepreneur," think attitude - towards engaging the world, and changing it.