EDO 818 Module 6 Multicultural and Virtual Teams Example

Nine Engineers, Three Time Zones, One Membrane: Leading a Multicultural Virtual Team Through Its First Six Months

Student Name

Doctor of Education Program, Aspen University

EDO 818: Leading Across Contexts and Cultures

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Nine Engineers, Three Time Zones, One Membrane: Leading a Multicultural Virtual Team Through Its First Six Months

In January, Clearbrook Water Systems formed a product development team to design a new membrane cartridge for municipal water treatment, with pilot production due in fourteen months. The team has nine engineers: three in Saint Paul, including the team leader, three in Brno and three in Penang. Saint Paul and Brno overlap for about two working hours a day; Saint Paul and Penang barely overlap at all. By June the team was six weeks behind schedule. Brno engineers said decisions were made without them, Penang engineers rarely spoke in the weekly video meeting held at 8:00 a.m. Minnesota time and Saint Paul engineers privately described the other sites as slow. Yet the team's most promising design, a cartridge that removed four assembly steps, came from Penang. This paper diagnoses the team's first six months and proposes how to lead it through the next phase. The company, the team and every figure are invented.

Diversity's Costs and Gains

Stahl et al. (2010) conducted a meta-analysis of studies of culturally diverse teams. They found that cultural diversity was associated with process losses, more task conflict and less social integration, and with process gains, more creativity and greater member satisfaction. Diversity had no simple overall effect on performance. Its effects depended on conditions: for example, diversity's creative benefits were more likely in complex tasks, and its effects differed by team tenure, size and whether members were co-located or dispersed. The authors concluded that the question is not whether cultural diversity helps or hurts teams but how it is managed.

The Clearbrook team shows both sides. Disagreement about how to test membranes, rooted partly in different engineering traditions, slowed early decisions. But the four-step reduction came from a Penang engineer who had worked on a different assembly method in a previous job, the kind of variety in perspective that diversity offers.

Distance and Conflict

Hinds and Mortensen (2005) compared co-located and distributed teams in a multinational company and found that distributed teams experienced more interpersonal and task conflict. Three conditions moderated the effect: a shared team identity, a shared context in which members understood each other's work settings and spontaneous communication, the informal, unplanned exchanges that let members raise and resolve issues early. Spontaneous communication in particular helped teams identify and manage conflict before it escalated.

The Clearbrook team had little of any of these. Members identified with their sites rather than the team; few had seen the other plants; and the only communication was the scheduled weekly meeting and formal e-mail. The conflict that Saint Paul engineers attributed to the other sites' slowness was, at least in part, the conflict Hinds and Mortensen found in distributed teams without these conditions.

Missing Mutual Knowledge

Cramton (2001) studied teams of students at universities in different countries collaborating on projects and identified the mutual knowledge problem. Dispersed team members often failed to communicate and retain contextual information, such as local constraints and changes, information was unevenly distributed, members had difficulty conveying and interpreting the importance of information, people accessed information at different speeds and silence was hard to interpret. Rather than recognizing these situational causes, members tended to attribute problems to their distant colleagues' personal characteristics, such as laziness or incompetence.

Several incidents fit. In March, a Saint Paul customer meeting changed a pressure requirement, and the change reached Brno two weeks later, after Brno had run a test series to the old specification. In April, Penang engineers' silence about a proposed test plan was read in Saint Paul as agreement; they had concerns but were waiting to raise them privately. In both cases, Saint Paul engineers attributed the problem to the other sites rather than to missing information.

What the Saint Paul Engineers Missed

The Saint Paul engineers were not careless. They worked in the building where customers visited, where the program manager sat and where most decisions were discussed over coffee before anyone wrote them down. From inside that setting, the information they had felt like common knowledge, and the other sites' questions felt like slowness. Cramton's research suggests this is the normal experience of the best-connected location in a dispersed team, and that the fix lies in the team's routines rather than in anyone's character. The team leader, herself in Saint Paul, said after reading the incident list that she had assumed the weekly meeting carried everything important, when most decisions had been made before it.

The Diagnosis

A Plan for the Next Phase

First, a two-week co-located start: the whole team will meet in Brno for the start of the design verification phase, building shared identity and shared context that Hinds and Mortensen found reduce conflict. Second, a shared decision log: every decision or change in requirements will be recorded the same day with its reasons, addressing Cramton's mutual knowledge problem. Third, rotating meeting times so that no site always meets at night, and a short written input round before each meeting, giving Penang engineers a channel to raise concerns that does not require public disagreement. Fourth, informal channels: a team chat with a norm of posting work in progress, which creates the spontaneous communication the research identifies. Fifth, the team leader will ask about missing context before attributing a problem to a person.

Judging Progress

The team will be judged on its schedule recovery, the number of requirement changes reaching all sites within two days, participation by each site in decisions as recorded in the log and a short quarterly survey on team identity and conflict.

Conclusion

The Clearbrook team's troubles came from cultural diversity and from distance, and distance was at least as important. Stahl and colleagues show that diversity brings both conflict and creativity, Hinds and Mortensen show how shared identity, context and spontaneous communication reduce conflict in distributed teams, and Cramton explains why missing knowledge leads members to blame each other. A co-located start, a shared decision log, fairer meetings and informal channels address the diagnosis while keeping the creative gains that produced the team's best idea.

References

Cramton, C. D. (2001). The mutual knowledge problem and its consequences for dispersed collaboration. Organization Science, 12(3), 346-371. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.12.3.346.10098

Hinds, P. J., & Mortensen, M. (2005). Understanding conflict in geographically distributed teams: The moderating effects of shared identity, shared context, and spontaneous communication. Organization Science, 16(3), 290-307. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1050.0122

Stahl, G. K., Maznevski, M. L., Voigt, A., & Jonsen, K. (2010). Unraveling the effects of cultural diversity in teams: A meta-analysis of research on multicultural work groups. Journal of International Business Studies, 41(4), 690-709. https://doi.org/10.1057/jibs.2009.85