Teamwork is more important than ever in the workplace as projects get bigger, more intricate, and more technical. These projects require the expertise of professionals from different fields, who often took a different path either in their career or eve in their education. But what happens when even their cultural background, work habits, and nationality differ.

A Global Team can be defined as a team “in which members come from two or more national or cultural backgrounds”. They are proliferating as globalization has forced companies to address different markets worldwide at the same time. I myself am part of a global team as a part of my COMM 101 course, and even though we aren’t addressing international matters that much, it is interesting to see how we all do things differently.

A study made by google determined what made a great team work so well and what elements were shown to improve communication and efficiency between members. It found that personality (role, interactions, and values) is a major determinant of what makes a great team, so it could be counter intuitive to assign a task to a group of people from international backgrounds and expect great results, but it seems to be working surprisingly well for the companies that employ Global teams.

For example, McDonald’s states that it has used global teams to sort problems relating to customer satisfaction, health issues, environmental issues and more. The end result was that the performance in resolving issues was consistent, fluid, but also flexible.

On an other hand, global teams with members who operate mostly in their home countries or in different countries from each each other and who can only meet in person on certain occasions are a different concept. They need to put more work into the flow of ideas, the communication of advancement, and the fixing of issues and problems. Since they are only rarely in direct relation to each other, the need to make sure that the objectives, roles, and expectations are well understood, even more than in any other team. With today’s globalization, it may sometimes be necessary to have workers stationed in different parts of the world, if local immediate information is needed for example.

Global teams seem to be extremely efficient, and after doing research I imagined that that efficiency came from the fact that the heterogenous composition allows a very special flow of responsibility, since when one’s skills end, it is almost guaranteed that someone else takes over in the conception of solutions and advancements.

Is it necessary for all teamwork efforts to be international and culturally mixed?

Feel free to discuss it in the comments!

Sources:

https://hbr.org/2017/01/great-teams-are-about-personalities-not-just-skills

https://hbr.org/2015/10/global-teams-that-work

http://www.franchisedirect.com/information/markettrendsfactsaboutfranchising/thesuccessofmcdonalds/8/1111/