HRM 345 Unit 1-Individual Project

Remaining competitive in a global economy frequently means moving from a national to a transnational organization. Developing teams that cross national boundaries is becoming a strategic business need.

Address the issues associated with having a transnational team with members who reside in multiple countries.

Respond to the following questions:

• How would you determine team composition in a multinational team?

• How will you address the diversity of cultures within the team?

• Because the team will operate in a virtual existence, what structure and support will this team need to foster productivity?

• How will you measure the success of the team?

• What are the characteristics you will look for in a leader of this team?

Diverse Teams

Ways of determination of the team composition in a multinational team

There are different ways that companies can determine the composition of the team in a multinational company. One such way is based on attributes (Mello & Ruckes, 2006). There are some companies that prefer the heterogeneity attributes. These are attributes of the team members where one employee likes sharing some important ideas to other members of the team and they do not follow everything without questioning whether that will beneficial for the organization.

Team composition may also be determined by the gender and sexual orientation of the team members. The composition of the team may be changed if the organization sees that the members of the team are only composed of people from one specific gender, specifically the male gender (Mello & Ruckes, 2006). In a multinational team, diversity is very important. For this reason, the company will try to incorporate as many women as possible to become members of the team.

Team composition may also be determined by qualification. For a high level expert level group that is highly involved in financial and technical deliberations regarding an international project, the company may want to engage people who come across as extremely and highly qualified for the role. Perhaps the company may engage the people who have acquired doctorate as part of the team.

Addressing Diversity of Cultures in the Teams

To address the diversity of cultures that happens within the team, it will be important for the team leader to ensure that there are no stereotypes. Each member should learn to respect the culture of other people. It is also not enough to respect the culture, but people are also required to learn the aspects of culture of these people so that they can even appreciate these cultures more than they do in the present. The manager can encourage the team members to always focus on treating each other with a high level of respect and equality (Cherian et al., 2020).

The focus here is that all the employees who subscribe to a certain culture are equal. Since they are equal, they both deserve the same treatment and there should never arise a situation in the company where one culture is put above the rest of the culture. It is important to consider the fact that all the employees who belong to different cultures have the same opportunity, they are talented and they can equally contribute to high levels of success in the organization. The manager also ought to encourage the members from the different ethnic communities to continually work together and ensure that they get used to supporting and even collaborating with people who may not be from the same cultural background as they are.

Structuring and Supporting a Multi-cultural Team that is also a virtual team

To support this multi-cultural team, it is very important that the team manager focuses on clarifying the goals and the expectations of the team so that when they are performing in this team, they do so in a manner to suggest that they have understood the goals and the objectives of the team. The other thing is to ensure that the multicultural teams have enough tools that can support the virtual team environments (Caramela, 2021). They need to possess the necessary headsets, the computers and the laptops that can support the virtual work teams. It is important to fully encourage them so that they can continue to be focused on their work rather than being distracted. They can be focused if they are not spending all their energies working yet they also need some time off to relax. Therefore, the leader will encourage a strategy where the team members work for some time and they can work out also. The leader needs to keep abreast with what the workers are doing by ensuring that the regular meetings that encourage the employee engagement activities are engaged in the organization. Supporting them is also about ensuring that they create some long lasting employee connections that will help them even be more successful.

Measuring the success of the team

There are different ways that the success of the team can be measured. The first and most obvious way of measuring the project success is to ensure that the viable and the useful metrics of each team project are established so that success of the team can easily be determined. The other method is getting feedback regarding the work that the team members are doing by looking at or talking to managers that are in other departments in the organization. Success can also be measured through the establishment of the KPI’s. These are the key performance indicators that can be used in the measurement of specific organizational performance.

Key Characteristics of the Team Leader

The team leader must be somebody who is a people’s person, he or she must be visionary, have that global minded, have a high level of cultural awareness and this leader should also be charismatic. The leader should be a person of complete integrity, be a very honest individual and work hard to an extent that they encourage other members of the team to follow suit. He must be an active listener too.

References

Caramela, S. (2021). 6 Ways to Keep Remote Workers Engaged - businessnewsdaily.com. Business News Daily. https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7228-engaging-remote-employees.html

Cherian, J., B, G. V., & P, P. R. (2020). The role of cultural diversity and how they impact work team performance. International journal of mechanical engineering and technology (ijmet), 11(9). https://doi.org/10.34218/ijmet.11.9.2020.002

Mello, Antonio S., & Ruckes, Martin E. (2006). Team Composition*. The Journal of Business, 79(3), 1019–1039. https://doi.org/10.1086/500668