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Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 45-63, 2000
© 2000 Elsevier Science, Inc.
ISSN 0090-2616/OO/$-see frontmatter
PU S0090-2616(00)00012-7
Creating Value with Diverse
Teams in Global Management
JOSEPH J . DISTEFANO
INTRODUCTION
T
oday's economy increasingly requires
people to collaborate in teams that cross
cultural and geographic boundaries. Sometimes team members are all located in the
same physical setting. More and more frequently, they are scattered across a city, a
country, or the globe. In theory, these teams
should create significant competitive advantage by bringing together different ideas,
pools of knowledge, and approaches to
work. However, in practice global teams do
not often create the value expected. Instead,
members clash, and the teams are either paralyzed into inaction or worse. With today's
workforce demographics, the existence of
culturally diverse teams is inevitable; and
with today's competitive environment, firms
cannot afford to forego their value.
A few years ago we began a systematic
study of multicultural teams. The literature
told us that diverse teams have a lot of potential. Compared to homogeneous teams
they can be more creative, generate more and
MARTHA L. MAZNEVSKI
better alternatives to problems, and generate
more and better criteria for evaluating alternatives. However, in no research did diverse
teams outperform homogeneous ones on
overall solution quality, and in only one
study did they equal the homogeneous
teams. But a couple of studies and a wealth
of anecdotal evidence suggested a slightly
different story. Diverse teams tend to perform either better or worse than homogeneous ones, with more performing worse
than better (see Fig. 1). We set out to determine what distinguished the poor performers from the high performers, and to develop
ways of helping culturally diverse teams at
the bottom of the performance graph leapfrog the homogeneous teams and create
value....