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.