Cross-Cultural Team Building

As team building is in fashion and the market of team building interventions is huge, the demand of international growing organisations and the evolving cross-cultural element is rising. Thus, we have to pay extraordinary attention to intercultural teams with the help of team building. Do we? The following article will examine the definition of teams – what they are and what they are not, how they could differ and which differences need to be taken into account on multi-cultural team building processes. This paper is an approach to explore its fundamentals, practices and its reliability.

In chapter one the fundamentals of teams, team dynamics and multicultural teams will be discussed in detail. The second chapter highlights the cross-cultural team stages, the team building process and its interventions to understand how to move from a multicultural to a cross-cultural team. Therefore, it will examine an overview of cross-cultural team building measures in its vast scope of team building providers in chapter two. Moreover, chapter three should discuss research and results on the effectiveness of team building measures and possibly necessary methods to maintain the effects of team building events. It will be discussed what has to be taken into account to create team building programs as well as advantages and disadvantages and results on the effectiveness of team building programs.

As the terms cross-cultural, intercultural and multicultural are relevant to the understanding and not randomly utilised, this distinction has to be defined more precisely: multicultural can be understood as a team including several cultures. The term cross-cultural refers to an involving or bridging of differences between cultures that focuses on the process, like teambuilding does. In addition, intercultural means the consistence of or the involving or representing of different cultures in a team. Where the term cross-cultural refers to the interaction between individuals from different cultures the term multi-cultural refers more or less only to the cultural diversity. Based on this definition cross-cultural team building is used in multi-cultural teams to build intercultural teams.