Dealing with cross-Border teamwork approach

ABSTRACT In recent years of 21st century, development of technology has extended to a process oriented, e-business world that is increasing in business-to-business, web-centric interactions. Being regarded as a new approach that emerging in today’s global economics, cross-border teamwork becomes more and more popular in enhancing competitive advantages. This paper examines the concepts of teamwork, cross-border teamwork and virtual teamwork. It presents a framework to deal with cross-border teamwork approach and to build up an effective cross-border team. INTRODUCTION It can be said that globalization has been one of the most hotly-debated topics in international economics over the past few years. Unprecedented changes in communications, transportation, and computer technology have given the process new impetus and made the world more interdependent than ever. Multinational corporations manufacture products in many countries and sell to consumers around the world. In this global prospect, working as team is not only a trend but also meeting work requirement. The term “teamwork” or “cross-border teamwork” is becoming more and more popular in every organization, enterprise and company. Cross-border teamwork is particularly important in global business management. Globalization creates global firms with many subsidiary that differ in culture, time zones and attitudes, communication and management styles, organizational learning and knowledge management, international negotiations, international business strategy, virtual teams, and human resource management issues. In the field of human resource management, building an effective teamwork, especially an effective cross-border teamwork, will help companies to improve competitive advantages and meet requirements of globalization process. People in every workplace talk about building the team, working as a team, but few understand how to create the experience of team work or how to develop an effective team. To understand more about forming and developing a team as well as a cross-border team, this paper will focus on 3 main parts as follows: Part 1: Overview of teamwork Part 2: Dealing with cross-border teamwork approach Part 3: Building an effective cross-border teamwork Overview of teamwork Approach of teamwork Being aware of the current swift changes in the business environment, foremost on the global stage, one surely has to underline the growing importance of teams. Keeping in mind this new focus in the world of business, commonly described as globalization (Foa, Roberto, 2004), individual skills or self – reliance are in many cases not sufficient to keep up with today’s demand. This obviously implies the universally accepted notion that teams in general outperform individuals (See Mooney, Ann C.,2001). In line with this observation Katzenbach and Smith in their widely acknowledged publication on the advantages of teams put it bluntly as “people so committed to something larger than themselves” (Katzenbach, Jon R., Smith, Douglas K.,1993). Team is defined as a group consisting small number of people with the complementary skills who are committed to some common purpose, performance goals, and the approach for which they will hold themselves mutually accountable (Publicguideworld.com, Teamwork). When a person has all the talents and the enthusiasm in the world and yet he doesn’t have free time to work, it all turns out useless. Availability of every member is very much needed to work as a team. If no one’s there, who do you expect to pursue the team’s goals? This work-ability is not all about free-time, however, it also entails a large amount of adaptability. Every member must be able to expect different possibilities and must know how to react on them should they arise in the course of events. Understanding among team members is a necessity in every team for every member to be able to work in the best of his abilities. Everyone must be open to new ideas and suggestions. Everyone must have the capability to understand people. It is in keeping the communication lines open that the team can more efficiently achieve its goals. Every team member must be able to practice respect so that he can expect to be respected in return. A team could discuss things and every member could voice out his own opinion in whatever matter they are discussing without degrading his teammate or his teammate’s suggestions no matter how irrational they are. It is one thing to listen and be able to humbly object and it is another thing to just avoid to listen. Whenever a team is brainstorming, everyone must be able to raise his opinions without having any hard feelings. Advantages of teamwork As we mentioned above that working as team is not only a trend but also meeting work requirement in the globalization context. We should also know that there are several advantages of teamwork. Pooling knowledge and resources is one of teamwork benefits. In a team with lots of members, members may be from different apartments of the same company, they have different expertise, in such team, members can be free to show their special knowledge, and diversity of information can be provided in the team. It will save much more time to find the resources than individual work. Teamwork also helps diversify skill and experiences in workplace. Every member is specialized in one field. A good organization is really needed in proper distribution of work. The best member of any group is he who demands work based on what he can do. It is every group member’s responsibility to ensure that everyone has a work to do and that everyone is always the best man for his job. A combination of strengths -especially if the team has been chosen carefully, it can get a good range of abilities, fields of expertise and personality types, so for every situation there should be at least one person who can deal with it. A range of opinions - if "two heads are better than one," six can be better still - a group meeting is often very useful for ironing out flaws in a plan, testing it out, spotting pitfalls etc. “The bigger picture drives your actions; your function exists to serve the bigger picture”(Cited by Susan M. Healthfield, About.com) Divided responsibility - while ultimate responsibility rests with the team leader, not much can be achieved without an effective team. The team structure allows those who have strengths in a particular area to take more responsibility for that area. Team spirit - a good team, well led, creates loyalty in its members. Not wanting to let your team-mates down can be a powerful motivating force, as can the sense of pride in being part of a successful group. Building a team-oriented environment contributes to the overall success of the organization. In this environment, one works with fellow members of the organization to produce these results. Even though one has a specific job function and belongs to a specific department, he or she is unified with other organization members to accomplish the overall objectives. It is necessary to differentiate this overall sense of teamwork from the task of developing an effective intact team that is formed to accomplish a specific goal. People confuse the two team building objectives. This is why so many team building seminars, meetings, retreats and activities are deemed failures by their participants. Leaders failed to define the team they wanted to build. Developing an overall sense of team work is different from building an effective, focused work team when considering team building. Dealing with cross-border teamwork approach Key issues for understanding cultural differences Globalization context requires multicultural knowledge to achieve business results. To lead successfully across borders and cultures, it is imperative to understand differences in cultural values, and their influences on everyday business practices. Key issues covered include: a deeper understanding of differences in values, behaviors and attitudes, and their practical implications for leading successfully across borders and cultures. The first problem in dealing with cross-border teamwork approach is Culture. It needs to have a general view of general culture, national culture and organizational culture. Culture is defined as a pattern of beliefs and expectations shared by the organization members. These beliefs and expectations produce norms that powerfully shape the behavior of individuals and groups in the organization (Schwartz and Davis, 1981). It can be said that culture is the concept we use to explain seemingly patterned behaviors from the perspective of a social group. Culture is the complex matrix of behavior; a shared system of valued sensibilities and practices which influence individuals’ habitual ways of saying and doing things. Culture is all the things taken-for-granted and presumed as a basis for communication. Culture refers to the usual ways of doing and saying. Culture is the common sense in situations and their affairs and activities. People spend all their time learning how and why to act, learning what emotion goes with what cognitive affair, learning how to use language, how to see things, hear things, and touch things, learning things so well that they become habits of experience. Every nation has its own national culture. The concept of cultural nation poses one of the major problems in the humanities since there is no consensus how to define it. A base line would be to say that the members of a cultural nation are aware of constituting an ethical-political body together, which is differentiated from others by the members sharing a number of defining cultural features. Those features can include language, religion, tradition, or shared history. All this can be taken as a sign of a historically evolved distinct culture. The question whether a nation needs to have an associated territory is subject of debate. (En.wikipedia.org, Nation). Each organization has its own distinctive culture, which combined from strategy, leadership, history, size and human. It would be said that culture is an important factor that represents the image of one corporate, and it creates the tradition or “the way we do things around here” (Deal and Kennedy, 1982). There are many researches about corporate culture including Geert Hofstede’s theory, which defines culture as the “collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another” (Hofstede, 1991). He stated that culture does not belong to any individual, but to groups. Cross-cultural communication (also frequently referred to as intercultural communication, which is also used in a different sense, though) is a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves , and how they Endeavour to communicate across cultures (En.wikipedia.org, Cross-cultural communication). Effective teams have at least two common characteristics. First character is individuals' behavioral styles and skills are complementary. The second is individuals are aware of how cultural differences affect cooperation and interactions. This knowledge will enable team members to work together to assimilate into new teams and quickly become effective. In today's multicultural business environment, high-performing multicultural teams can out-perform homogeneous teams when their diverse skills and contributions are maximized (Hodge-ia.com, Cross-cultural business skills). Although human resources departments are becoming increasingly supportive of cross-cultural training for expatriating employees and their families, the effectiveness of this training has not kept pace with the increasing demand for practical, performance-related knowledge and skills. As business becomes more competitive, expatriating employees must become competent in working and managing in the new culture. We need to raise the bar; instead of generalities, cross-cultural training must be tied to improving performance and bottom-line results. Dealing with Time Zones Time difference is another problem in dealing with cross-border teamwork approach. Time becomes a problem when people who are not in the same place and need some of their activities to be synchronized. When working with different time zones, individuals can be a day behind of getting something done. Time zones need to be kept in mind when trying to stay connected with someone from another country. The time difference becomes a greater concern as the distance between the teams grows. We have different time zones all over the world and it may be difficult to get everybody on the right time. It may be midnight in one part of the world and it may be the rush hour in another business. This is a problem because everybody needs to be on the same page and doing the same thing. One may not desires to schedule one team meeting during regular business hours and the other team meeting at 2 a.m. Anytime that a communication for instance needs to be immediately connected to Asia countries from the United States, users will have a hard time to obtain communication because it will be a different time in Asia countries and people will probably be asleep and not receive the intended communication in time. The time difference makes it hard on cross-border teams but is still an obstacle that can be overcome. Communication One obvious problem that can arise is communication in different language barriers. People in different countries have different languages. One of the main problems in dealing with cross-border teams is the difference in languages that are spoken. When the team members speak different languages they have trouble in communicating. Many things could go wrong if clear communication is not initiated then many problems could occur in such things such as orders, measurements, and prices. The language problem can be somewhat difficult to overcome if a common language is not agreed upon. The major languages used in businesses today are English, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. If a common language can be agreed upon in advance, this problem can be alleviated. The language barrier is a small problem but will be overcome if management selects their cross-border team members with great care. Communication is a major challenge because of different cultures among team members. However, it may be not necessary for communication to be the same when we match teams in a multi-cultural environment. Clearly transferring information among team members is main problem to deal with. Because many of these members reside in different time zone areas, it is a “rule of thumb” to be precise in what each member wants to know and how well they ask a question. If team members phrase their questions carefully the first time, they will get their point across successfully without having to deal with sending changes and making up for the time lost (Alexander 2000). Writing clearly and not using acronyms is another way to deal with this issue. Advances in technologies have increased each person’s ability and likelihood of interacting with people of cultural backgrounds quite different from their own. According to Visions Inc, “Multiculturalism is a process of change by which we learn to recognize, understand and appreciate cultural identities, as well as the similarities and differences of people from other cultural groups.” There are a few issues that can arise from workers from different cultures. Maybe some workers will want to be aggressive about their work and others would not want to be like this because they do not believe in being that way. People from different cultures may tend to misunderstand each other’s behaviors or stereotype people from other countries and hence come to distrust one another (Dash 2001, Alexander 2000, Cascio 2000). Communications needs to be carefully managed when dealing with cross-border teams in order to work efficiently and effectively. Working in a cross-cultural team can create awareness concerning the principal cultural differences that affect communication and working situations, and it can provide techniques for lessening culturally-based problems. Eventually with the growing use of the Internet to conduct business to business transactions it is essential for cultures to learn to adapt and understand cultural issues. Virtual team Overview As we may know that information and communication technologies are impacting today's organizations and businesses in many diverse ways. The implications are perceived at the individual, organizational, and national levels. The old accustomed-to boundaries of national economies and markets are giving way to globalization and newly emerging trends. Due to high competition and the forces of change, the world market will sweep aside the small market players to make way for global organizations that are capable of penetrating the world markets through a massive global outreach strategy. In that respect, it is necessary to invest in innovative business models such as virtual multicultural teams that are capable of handling the pressures of growing competition while capitalizing on the evolution of information and communication technology (Portal.acm.org, The role of virtual multicultural teams in corporate culture). Organizations which capable of rapidly creating virtual teams of talented people can respond quickly to changing business environments. Capabilities of this type offer organizations a form of competitive advantage. Virtual teams can provide an organization with a solid opportunity to compete, making it easier to adapt to different situations and reducing conflicts. A virtual team is defined as a group of people who work on interdependently across space, time, cultures, and organizational boundaries on temporary, non-occurring projects with a shared purpose while using technology (Jarvenpaa, 1998; Lipnack & Stamps, 2000; Robey et al., 2000). Virtual working is based on the premise that people do not necessarily need to be in the same location to get the job done. It has been driven by improvements in technology such as email, mobile phone and internet which means there is less of a need to be office or desk bound. A virtual team consists of a group of skilled people who work together on a project but aren’t necessarily in the same location – often they work from home - and in some instances, colleagues never actually see each other, communicating only by phone, fax and email. Virtual teams can be project-based, product based, service and support teams, cross-border management teams, or instant response teams pulled together to address emergency situation. They can of course also be people trying to make a living and build a business at the same time, requiring the expertise of other workers in areas that will support the company. Global organizations need to operate through a very flexible structure that allows freedom and speed, and replaces the hierarchical models with structures that are flatter and adequate for stronger and more efficient communication. Such a structure will allow bottom-up decision making and self-management and will capitalize on the advantages of employing multicultural teams. Benefits of virtual team Virtual teams have been now popular in global economics. There are many benefits of virtual working or virtual teams. The use of virtual teams is growing in popularity especially in work-related and educational organizations. Research findings business that allows its employees to work in virtual teams more effectively. Working in virtual teams presents unexplored opportunities for peer interaction as teams create new knowledge to resolve their problem or project. Damon (1984) asserts that