Critical Situations in Multicultural Teams. Challenges for Multinational Companies

As a result of the increasing globalization the business world gets interconnected and more and more organizations are operating internationally. Such multinational companies often rely on successful teamwork to reach goals and to compete on the fast-paced global market. Indeed, teamwork plays a variety of important roles; when employees with varying skill sets and ideas are working together in a team not only information and knowledge can be shared, successful teamwork can also lead to faster results. A group of employees clearly can achieve more than one individual alone.

Teams, whose members come from different nations and backgrounds place special demands on operations, diversity clearly adds complexity and a longer learning curve for establishing effective processes.
In the multicultural team, obviously, culture itself is one significant characteristic, in addition the role of emotions in the team have gained increasing interest in the last years. Nevertheless, research in this field is scarce and through adding an additional variable – culture, the multicultural character is making research even more complicate. Practitioners report that where people work together, emotions are not far to seek. While influencing our thinking and behavior, the effects of emotions and the resulting behavior can either be positive, or negative.

In multicultural teams an awareness of emotions seems to be especially important as cultural differences in emotion processing and diversity among members may cause negative emotion and lead to conflict and misunderstandings what may have serious consequences reducing performance.

The aim of this paper is to identify challenges for multinational teams focusing on emotions within the team, and to propose emotional intelligence as an approach to multicultural team effectiveness.
The two research questions guiding this work are:

1. What role do emotions play in the multicultural team?

2. Is emotional intelligence connected with multicultural team effectiveness?