Jeane Brett in her book, Negotiating Globally, writes the following:
Teams bring essential resources to big, complex tasks. Teams can produce creative ideas, meet deadlines with quality products, and negotiate decisions that generate corporate growth and prosperity. Research shows that when team minorities dissent, majorities are more likely to generate original and novel solutions to problems. Organizations grow faster when top-management teams engage in constructive debate. Companies with top-management teams that engage in debate have a higher return on investment. Cross-functional, new-product teams are more innovative when they have a lot of disagreement about task design if they have a norm for open expression of doubts or if they engage in collaborative problem solving. Constructive controversy, the open-minded discussion of opposing views for mutual benefit, appears to be the key to creating value during multicultural team decision making.”
As I’ve spent last year and this year working with groups that come from different backgrounds and different countries I can see the value in multicultural, multinational teams. Continue reading “Multinational teams – Are they doomed from the start?”