Handling the Cultural Barriers in Managing a Multinational Team

With the development of International Business (IB), companies face a need to ensure successful collaboration and healthy working environment between employees of different cultural backgrounds. Effectively leading a multicultural team is a challenge that many companies, who choose the internationalization path, face nowadays. Despite these challenges, there are obvious benefits from cultural diversification of the team such as creativity boost due to different views of the members of the team. The optimization of the cross-cultural collaboration remains a key focus for International Business scholars. People falsely tend to assume that challenges on multicultural teams arise from differing styles of communication. There are much deeper and many more reasons for cultural incidents. Although it is hard to imagine a multinational team, consisting of individuals from different backgrounds, not having cultural misunderstandings from time to time, the main focus is to identify when and why cultural conflicts appear and what consequences they have or might have on the performance, employee satisfaction and the productivity of the team members involved, as well as the entire team. This research is meant to develop recommendations to handle cultural barriers and prevent conflicts from happening and the existing conflicts from escalating.