Managing Global Teams

Introduction

Multinational companies increasingly hire and manage global teams and view the same as a strategic human resource solution. They tap into a pool of talent and expertise across geographical, cultural and temporal boundaries. The main objectives behind this decision are easy and lower cost of access to local markets and customers, bringing in varied and quality talent and expertise on the same table, leveraging on each other strengths to enhance efficiency, improve knowledge management, enhance innovation and improve productivity. This facilitates diverse viewpoints and perspectives thus ensuring greater degree of quality knowledge sharing, solutions and productivity. However, despite the several benefits of having a global team and managing business on an international scale, there are several challenges that an organization has to face in managing the team such as collaboration, managing cultural diversity, communication, knowledge sharing, developing effective global leadership, ensuring that the remote employees are well engages, monitoring of the distant employees, managing virtual teams and virtual communication etc.

This paper analyses 4 articles on this topic and conducts a detailed comparative analysis on the ideas and arguments put forward by the authors, similarities amongst the articles and the different conclusions drawn and the efficacy and practicality of the same. The articles that are compared in this assignment are:

1. Tsedal Neelay (2015), Global Teams that Work, Harvard Business Review
2. Rebecca Heller, Aaron Laurito, Kurt Johnson, Maureen Martin, Rex Fitzpatrick and Kirsten Sundin (2010, Global Teams: Trends, Challenges and Solutions, Centre for Advanced Human Resource Studies, Cornell University
3. Anca Ştefania Stan, Vasile Alecsandri (2010), Managing Global Teams, University of Bacau, Romania, Studies and Scientific Researches͘ Economics Edition, No. 15
4. Jennifer L. Gibbs, Rutgers University Malgorzata Boyraz, Rutgers University, International HRM’s Role in Managing Global Teams

Global Teams

Many a times it is observed that study and analysis of the global teams overlap with the study of multinational teams, inter-cultural teams, virtual and distributed teams. Thus it is imperative to take all these aspects of global teams to have a comprehensive analysis of the challenges faced by global teams of all nature. Each of the teams that are aforementioned has specifics and characteristics that differentiate them from each other. For example while multinational and cross cultural teams may focus more on interaction among employees pertaining to various nations and cultures, virtual teams would essentially have its focus on communication across time and space. These teams have some face to face interaction but largely they communicate virtually. (Armstrong, 2002)

There are several benefits of having a global team. With the ever increasing globalization, it has become imperative for multinational organizations to identify and explore opportunities in different parts of the world. These global teams facilitate easy and low cost access to local and specific markets and help the organization in identifying needs and demands of this market. The team thus helps the enterprise to connect and serve better to the international customers. Also one is able to learn, unlearn and integrate technologies across the globe and thus form a global research and development team to identify what is the best technology that can be employed to enhance innovation, efficiency and productivity across various departments such as sales and marketing, operations, finance, business development, supply chain etc. Also with global teams, there comes several diverse and fresh perspectives on the table and thus identify how can the needs and demands of global clients be fulfilled with the most differentiated product and service. A global team strengthens the entire system by facilitating healthy discussions and debates, bringing unique and fresh viewpoints and perspectives forward thus creating the most feasible and practical solutions to several current and unforeseen issues. (Briscoe, 2011)

Challenges in Managing Global Teams

Despite the several advantages of having global team, there have been numerous instances when companies have collapsed due to failure of their global teams. Managing a global team is fraught with several challenges such as lack of alignment in the global team members’ objectives with that of the company, lack of clarity among the global team units. Also a lot of these challenges surface due to several reasons such as global teams as opposed to traditional teams function across multiple contexts, multiple work environments, multiple geographies, widely dissimilar and at times contradicting and conflicting economies and political conditions, language barriers etc.

After a detailed study and analysis of all these papers, the following challenges are identified and explored in depth:

Geographical Separation

Increase in geographical separation leads to reduction in physical cues to contribute towards the development of mutual knowledge about the respective situations and issues and many a times it may also lead to incorrect attributions and complaints against remote and individual team members. This happens more often than not in the case of distributed teams where some team members make negative attributions about colleagues located in geography. This is borne out of the fact there are limited cues and low awareness of the situations and the problems faced by the employees in other geographical, economical and political conditions. As the day to day or sudden work constraints are not immediately known, global team members at time makes dispositional attributions about the distributed team members. During such accusations and attributions about distant team members, while the individuals or teams attribute their own shortcomings to situational factors, they largely attribute the weaknesses or lack of performance of distant team members to internal and personal traits. This leads to lack of support and trust amongst the team members and working in silos and limited transparency and communication among the team members. This also lowers trust and increase conflicts. (Bazarova, 2009)

Knowledge Sharing

Due to the spread of the team across time zones and geographical boundaries, knowledge sharing at times becomes a major challenge while managing global teams. The team members most of the time busy in managing challenges pertaining to their respective locations and regions, miss out on sharing key and tacit knowledge and information that may not seem vital in the present scenario but can help the distant teams in the long run in dealing with identical situations and issues. Also there is no definite commitment and responsibility to share knowledge as most of the team members would be committed to solve issues at hand in their respective geographies and do not realize the importance and objective of knowledge sharing and thus it is not in their priority. Being members of multiple teams, this also leads to unequal levels of commitment in sharing knowledge and expertise. Also many a time local knowledge is dependent on the local situations and local contexts and may seem irrelevant to the others thus rendering the distributed team members taking for granted that not all knowledge needs to be shared and it need not be in priority. Also for these members grasping the local situations and hence, the point of view of those local team members in a different geography is both difficult and at times unnecessary. (Caligiuri, 2014)