Team Building in International Organizations
With the rise of international teams spanning countries and continents, professionals of diverse nationalities and backgrounds face unique challenges. Team building in international organizations can be challenging with cross-cultural work approaches in professionalism and communication in addition to logistical obstacles of time zone and distance. Leadership styles, management and conflict resolution can be difficult to apply because of each culture's own beliefs and attitudes. Recognizing strengths, diversity, common ground, and communication are key to international team building.
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Creative Thinking
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To make international team building a success requires focus on the objectives of the team, rather than the team's cultural differences. Team Building, a team building resource, describes a successful team as one which thinks with innovation. A diverse team amplifies innovative thinking whether or not there are cultural differences. Cross-cultural teams have the added benefit of diversity for a contribution of superior creative solutions to team building.
Work Approach
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Work styles in cross-cultures need to be recognized regardless of the differences in approaches. For example, the American work culture functions with independence, while other work cultures rely on the boss in decision-making. With the mix of styles globally, the independent team players may come across as aggressive, while the followers may appear to contribute less to the team process. In team building, it is important to recognize the strengths of each member of the team despite the differences in personality types.
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Professional Identity
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Within cultural identity is professional identity. Engineers, accountants and other professionals are dedicated to their profession regardless of their culture or the company they work for. This is the common ground within a team for problem-solving. Jack Keogh states in his report, "International Teams: Beyond Cultural Differences," "These 'sub-divisions' of cultural identity that members bring to a team can be the source of many dilemmas that need to be reconciled." For effective team building internationally, professional common ground is key.
Communication
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With team building internationally, build creativity and cultural synergy with communication to meet customer's needs. Face-to-face communication rather than communicating by email is vital to effective team building, together with management discussions on challenges and solutions two to three times a day. Customer's needs can be met if processes are communicated to the team.
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