Multicultural Teams

Leadership in Science and
Technology: A Reference Handbook

Multicultural Teams
Contributors: Susan R. Fussell & Leslie D. Setlock
Editors: William Sims Bainbridge
Book Title: Leadership in Science and Technology: A Reference Handbook
Chapter Title: "Multicultural Teams"
Pub. Date: 2012
Access Date: August 23, 2014
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks
Print ISBN: 9781412976886
Online ISBN: 9781412994231
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412994231.n29
Print pages: 255-264
2012 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE knowledge. Please note that the pagination
of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
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2012 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. SAGE knowledge
Page 3 of 24 Leadership in Science and Technology: A Reference
Handbook: Multicultural Teams
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412994231.n29
Chapter 29: Multicultural Teams
[p. 255
]
Research and development in science and engineering is often conducted by teams
that are multicultural in membership, in that different members of the team have been
born and raised in a wide variety of nations and regions that are culturally distinct
from one another. For example, an academic research team in the United States is
likely to include researchers from Asia, Europe, South America, and a variety of other
locales in addition to those born in the United States. These multicultural teams can
face challenges because people have different norms, values, and expectations about
the role of leadership and how they should interact with one another.
One kind of multicultural team stems from the international nature of the graduate
student population in many countries. In the United States, for example, recent statistics
(Burelli 2010) indicate that in 2009, more than 250,000 foreign students were studying
science and engineering fields, roughly two thirds of which were master's and doctorate
students. A list of the top 10 countries of birth for these students includes 9 with
distinctly different cultures than that of the United States: China, India, South Korea,
Taiwan, Japan, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Mexico. As a result, several academic
research laboratories are likely to include students, faculty, and postdoctoral fellows
from a broad array of backgrounds. After graduation, some of these students go on to a
faculty or industry research position within the U.S. science and engineering community.
Multicultural science and engineering teams are also increasingly common in virtual
organizations that bring people from around the world together to work on common
problems (DeSanctis and Monge 1998). The power of global virtual organizations lies
in their ability to bring a broad array of expertise and resources to bear on a problem,
to find the best person for a job regardless of his or her location, and to optimize efforts
by working around the clock. Global virtual teams have played an increasingly important
role in research and development, software development, scientific collaboratories,
and many other domains (Brockhoff 1998, Olson, Zimmerman, and Bos 2008). In
addition, scientists and engineers are frequently members of international advisory
boards, conference program committees, and other ad hoc groups that require intensive
interaction among people from different cultures.
Both collocated and virtual multicultural teams face challenges stemming from
differences in cultural background, native language, local resources, and many other
factors (Sanchez-Burks and Lee 2007). Team members may vary in communication
styles (Hall 1976; Sanchez-Burks et al. 2003), norms for interpersonal interactions
(Morris, Podolny, and Sullivan 2008), work processes, and many other ways that
affect how successfully they can interact with one another and with the team leader.
Leaders themselves are shaped by their cultural background, with those from different
backgrounds preferring different leadership styles (House et al. 2004), negotiation
strategies (Adair and Brett 2005), and methods of dealing with conflict (Ting-Toomey et
al. 1991; Morris et al. 1998).
Mismatches in social conventions, work styles, power relationships, and conversational
norms can lead to misunderstandings that negatively affect the interaction. For
example, an individual from a task-oriented culture such as the United States or Canada
may focus exclusively on getting things done, overlooking the social niceties expected
by his or her colleagues from relationship-focused cultures such as China, Japan, or
Latin America. Similarly, an individual from a low-context communication culture, who
relies primarily on verbal language to express his or her thoughts, may ignore facial
expressions or tones of voice that are intended to be communicative by a colleague
from a high-context culture. These differences can affect both the success of the project
the team is engaged in and the personal relationships among group members.
[p. 256
]
People from different cultural backgrounds have been shown to vary in several ways,
which are typically referred to as cultural dimensions. These dimensions of variation
create challenges for key aspects of leadership and teamwork such as interpersonal
communication, coordination and collaboration, negotiation and conflict resolution,
and the development of good working relationships among team members. Leaders of
multicultural groups use several strategies and interventions to address these issues,
including cross-cultural training exercises and thoughtful choices of interaction styles
and information technology to be used by the team.
Types of Cultural Variation
Culture can be defined as a set of norms, roles, and values emphasized by a culture
and adopted, to greater or lesser degrees, by members of that culture through
such processes as imitation and teaching. What this means is that there are central
tendencies to think and behave within a particular culture that can vary from the
tendencies to think and behave in other cultures. Within a given culture, people are
not all the same: Some will adhere closely to the central tendencies of that culture, but
others may think and act differently. Nonetheless, the population of that culture as a
whole can be said to possess certain characteristics that are often distinct from those of
other cultures.
Although researchers agree that cultures differ in many ways, they have debated
exactly how culture should be defined and the specific dimensions along which cultures
vary (Hofstede 1983; Schwartz 1992; Triandis 1995). Four key dimensions of cultural
variation will be presented in this chapter: individualism versus collectivism, high
versus low context of communication, task versus relationship focus, and power
distance. These are the most commonly referenced dimensions as established by
cultural research and especially pertinent to leadership and teamwork in science and
engineering. It should be noted that cultural background is not the only important way
in which members of a team vary. Other factors also influence people's behavior,
including their personal characteristics, demographic factors such as gender and age,
and organizational culture. The cultural dimensions discussed in this section add yet
another source of variation, one with which many leaders may be less familiar.
Individualism versus Collectivism
Many culture theories distinguish between individualistic and collectivistic cultures. In
individualistic cultures such as that of the United States or Germany, people tend to
identify themselves first and foremost as individuals, with the primary goal of personal
gain. In collectivistic cultures such as those found in many Asian and Latin American
countries, people tend to identify themselves as a member of a larger collective and
focus on the betterment of that collective (Triandis 1995; Hofstede 2001). For example,
a student from an individualistic culture might choose a college major based on what
interested him or her most, or what might lead to the most profitable career. Once
successful in that career, his or her achievement would be attributed primarily to
individual traits, such as hard work, creativity, and discipline. In contrast, a student from
a collectivistic culture might choose a major based on what would be most beneficial to
his or her immediate family and close relatives, regardless of his or her own interest or
individual gain. Achievements would reflect on his or her parents and other family as
much as, or more than, his or her individual qualities.
Whether someone is from an individualistic or collectivistic cultural background has
far-reaching effects, influencing his or her cognitive processes (Nisbett 2003) and his
or her self-concept as either independent of or interdependent with other individuals
(Markus and Kitayama 1991). In addition, Geert H. Hofstede's (2001) analyses of
survey responses from IBM employees around the world show that cultural tendencies
toward individualism versus collectivism are associated with many aspects of daily life,
including business practices, child raising, and educational techniques.
High-Versus Low-Context Communication
Another way that cultures have been argued to differ is in the strategies members
use to communicate. Edward T. Hall (1976) distinguished between low context
communication, which is verbally explicit and to the point, with relatively little attempt
to mask one's feelings, and high-context communication, which is indirect, often
ambiguous, and sensitive to the specific situational context (e.g., the relationship
between speaker and addressee, nuances of facial expressions or tone of voice). Low-
context communication is typical of the United States, Canada, and many (but not all)
European countries, whereas high-context communication is typical of many Asian,
South American, and Middle Eastern countries.
Low- and high-context communication styles can be dramatically different for certain
types of messages. For example, low-context communicators are likely to express
disagreement outright (e.g., no, I think ), whereas high-context communicators
may use silence or indirect speech (e.g., moving on to another topic) to indicate
disagreement. In addition, low-context communicators are likely to express their
disagreement in the same way regardless of the setting of the conversation (e.g., work
versus home and peers versus superiors), whereas high-context communicators adjust
their communication to the specific people, places, and purposes of the conversation.
Although people in all cultures use both communication styles to some extent, research
suggests that low-context communication is preferred in individualistic societies [p. 257
] such as the United States and Canada and high-context communication is preferred
in collectivistic societies, particularly Asian cultures (Gudykunst, Ting-Toomey, and
Chua 1988; Gudykunst et al. 1996).
Task versus Relationship Focus
A third way that cultures have been argued to differ is in the orientation they take toward
the task at hand (Triandis 1995). Task-oriented cultures focus on getting work done in
a timely and efficient way, whereas relationship-oriented cultures focus on establishing
rapport with one's partners in addition to task completion. In task-oriented teamwork,
conversations revolve around the work itself and how to get it done. The exchange of
social pleasantries would be considered a diversion. In relationship-oriented cultures,
however, these social pleasantries are fundamental to the relationship goals of the
interaction.
This difference in task versus relationship orientation may lead to misunderstandings
and misattributions in collaborative work. When individuals from task-oriented cultures
fail to attend to relationship factors, they may be perceived as rude by their teammates
from relationship-oriented cultures; when individuals from relationship-oriented cultures
fail to focus exclusively on the task at hand, they may be perceived as undedicated by
their teammates from task-oriented cultures. The task versus relationship focus is only
quasi-independent of the other dimensions. Individualistic cultures such as the United
States, Canada, and Australia tend to use low-context communication styles and have
a task orientation. Collectivistic cultures such as Japan and China tend to use high-
context communication styles and to have a relationship orientation.
High-Versus Low-Power Distance
Finally, cultures vary in the ways the power dynamics that hold between leaders or
supervisors and the people who work for them. Power distance refers to the extent to
which members of an organization expect and tolerate an unequal distribution of power
based on the formal hierarchy of the organization (Hofstede 1983). For instance, in a
low-power-distance culture, workers would expect access to their superiors and would
expect to have a voice in decisions made by management that affect them. In a high-
power-distance structure, workers expect management to function over their heads
and expect different privileges for higher-level workers even beyond those specifically
associated with the job.
Hofstede's research has shown considerable variation across nations and cultures
in power distance. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, for
example, are considered to be low-power-distance cultures. Workers expect some
unequal distribution of power and privilege, but they expect to have some degree
of representation or access to superiors as well. Many work teams have a relatively
flat structure in which anyone can suggest goals, strategies, or tasks for the team to
achieve. In contrast, many Asian and Latin American cultures have a rather high-power-
distance culture, where workers expect that their management will make decisions, and
that they have to accept and act on those decisions. Members of work teams have little
opportunity for input and do not expect to have this input.
Summary
Cultures vary along several dimensions including individualism-collectivism, high-versus
low-context communication, task versus relationship focus, and low-versus high-power
distance. Although researchers debate about how many dimensions there are, and how
important each one is, these four dimensions have a large body of research to support
them. The next section presents a model of how variation along these dimensions can
influence important aspects of leadership and teamwork.
Effects of Cultural Diversity on Teamwork
The cultural dimensions discussed in the previous section, alone and in combination,
can influence many important aspects of teamwork including interpersonal
communication, task coordination, the establishment of working relationships,
and negotiation and conflict resolution. This section briefly describes how cultural
differences can affect each of these processes.
Interpersonal Communication
Most successful teamwork relies on leaders and team members being able to
communicate clearly with one another. This process can be hampered by cultural
differences in communication styles, particularly those between low-context
communicators who rely on explicit messages and high-context communicators who
rely on the context to make their meaning clear. One area in which problems have
been identified in multicultural teams is that of conversational grounding, or to the way
people interact to ensure that they understand one another's messages (Clark and
Brennan 1991). During conversational grounding, speakers and listeners ask each
other questions, provide clarifications, rephrase one another's messages, and work
together in other ways to ensure that messages are understood properly. Grounding is
particularly efficient when people share community comemberships, including shared
membership in a wider culture.
Cultures vary in their strategies for grounding conversations; that is, they exert different
effort into the grounding process and use different mechanisms for grounding. Han
Z. Li (1999) examined whether the effort pairs put into ensuring that messages were
properly understood [p. 258
] differed as a function of whether both members of

the pair were born and raised in Canada, both were born and raised in the People's
Republic of China, or one was from Canada and one was from China. Although both
Canadian-born and Chinese-born pairs spent about the same amount of time talking
during a task, the amount of talk was correlated with comprehension of the material the
speaker was trying to convey only for the Canadian pairs. Li concludes that although
grounding behaviors may be similar in Canadian and Chinese dyads, the purpose of
this grounding activity differs: For Chinese dyads, it is associated with relationship
building where as for Canadian dyads it improves information exchange.
Theorists have suggested that grounding in cross-cultural conversations may be
especially problematic because of differences in background knowledge (minimal
community comembership) and differences in conversational styles. Li found that cross-
cultural pairs in which a Chinese individual was the listener spent less effort ensuring
that messages were properly grounded (e.g., requesting clarification and expanding on
initial formulations) than cross-cultural pairs in which a U.S. individual was the listener.
Canadian listeners assumed that their job was to draw out the information from their
partner. Chinese listeners, coming from a more high-context style, assumed that their
partner was already telling them whatever they intended to share. In Li's study, the
communication task involved the exchange of medical information between a person
playing a doctor and a person playing a patient. In the cases where communication was
unsuccessful, the patient did not understand what the doctor was telling him or her. If
similar misunderstandings arise in real doctor-patient conversations, there might be
serious repercussions.
Cultural differences in communication processes also have bearing on the suitability
of different computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools for team interaction. For
example, members of high-context cultures that rely heavily on the situational context
of communication may be more disadvantaged by text-based media such as instant
messaging (IM) or e-mail than members of low-context cultures that rely predominantly
on the words exchanged. Being able to see and hear a conversational partner is more
important for grounding in high-context cultures than in low-context cultures because
awareness of how others are reacting to one's messages is an important aspect of high-
context communication (Hall 1976). Similarly, because auditory and visual cues can be
important for establishing rapport, CMC tools that eliminate these cues are likely to be
more disruptive to communication in relationship-oriented cultures than in task-oriented
cultures. Empirical studies have demonstrated that, in cross-cultural interactions, the
combination of these culturally bound communication traits can impact both the social
and task-related effectiveness of the interaction (Gudykunst, Ting-Toomey, and Chua
1988; Pekerti and Thomas 2003).
Task Coordination
Cultural differences can also affect how well teams can coordinate to achieve their
goals. Although some science and engineering tasks can be done individually, other
work requires the timely and appropriate exchange or aggregation of information,
materials, and other artifacts. As such, coordination in terms of setting shared deadlines
and determining who will provide what by these deadlines is essential. As Thomas
W. Malone and Kevin Crowston (1994) have pointed out, there are different ways this
coordination can be achieved. One way is through ongoing communication, in which
leaders and team members keep each other informed as to what needs to be done,
what they are doing, time estimates, and other key aspects of coordination. Good
communication can go a long way toward improving coordination, but the challenges
of establishing mutual understanding in multicultural teams suggest that leaders should
not rely solely on communication as their coordination strategy.
Leaders and teams can also achieve coordination with relatively little communication
if they share a common understanding or mental model of the work (Mohammed and
Dumville 2001). In a work setting, these mental models encompass such elements as
role assignments, power and status hierarchies, team procedures, and the external
working environment. When team members share mental models, they can anticipate
in advance what the team's goals and tasks are, what they themselves need to do, and
what their colleagues will do (Cannon-Bowers, Salas, and Converse 1993).
A challenge for multicultural teams is that people may come to the project with different
mental models of team structures and processes. For example, cultures high in power
distance may expect leaders to take the initiative for all group activities, whereas
cultures lower along this dimension may expect all team members to show initiative.
Cultural differences in mental models of time-related phenomena have also been found;
some cultures believe that deadlines and meeting times are meant to be precisely
observed, and other cultures believe that these are at best rough guidelines that one
may or may not follow.
Working Relationships
All the cultural differences discussed in the previous section can have a negative effect
on the development of pleasant and positive working relationships among members
of multicultural teams. In part, these problems arise because people from different
cultures have differing expectations of what these working relationships should entail.
For many individuals from task-oriented cultures, a good working relationship means
that people can work together successfully to get the task done. However, individuals
from relationship-oriented cultures may expect a closer personal connection with their
colleagues.
[p. 259
]
Research suggests that when team members come from cultures that prioritize
relationship development, they not surprisingly devote greater effort within an interaction
to building up relationships. Even when engaged in a task-focused activity, Chinese
team members devote more effort to explicit relationship building than U.S. team
members (Li 1999; Setlock, Fussell, and Neuwirth 2004). This can be observed in a
variety of aspects of the interaction, including the exchange of biographical information
(getting to know each other), attentiveness to the partner's opinions on the matter at
hand (e.g., explicitly asking a partner what he or she thinks), and the use of relational
communication strategies. Although such behaviors may be viewed positively by other
members of relationship-focused cultures, they are sometimes viewed as a distraction
or annoyance by members of task-focused cultures.
Work relationships can also be influenced by the manner of speech colleagues use
with one another. Relational aspects of communication are concerned not with what
information is conveyed but with how that information is conveyed and what this
indicates about the relationship between speaker and addressee(s). For example,
nonverbal cues such as eye gaze, facial expressions, and posture can be used to
express intimacy, trust, and attraction. In addition, the verbal content of messages
can be crafted in different ways to establish, maintain, and/or build closeness with (or
to maintain or increase distance from) a partner. Speakers decisions about forms of
address, informal versus formal language, use of swear words, and so on can all have
implications for their relationships with their addressees.
Cultural theorists suggest that high-context, relationship-oriented cultures place more
emphasis on relational communication than do low-context, task-oriented cultures
(Ting-Toomey et al. 1991). One area in which this hypothesis has been tested is that
of conversational indirectness. People can ask others to do things in a variety of ways,
including direct commands (e.g., take out the trash), indirect requests (e.g., would you
mind terribly taking out the trash?), and off-record statements (e.g., it's terribly messy in
here). In general, when requests are less direct, they are perceived to be more polite.
Many cross-cultural studies look at Asian cultures, such as Korea or China, which use
low-context communication, with western cultures such as the United States, United
Kingdom, and Canada, which use high-context communication. Studies examining
conversational indirectness have shown that speakers from high-context cultures such
as China and Korea use more indirectness than those from low-context cultures such
as the United States (Ambady et al. 1996; Holtgraves 1997). Chinese speakers are also
more likely than U.S. speakers to use language that promotes relationship building,
such as we pronouns and social language, both face-to-face and via IM (Setlock et
al. 2004). These mismatches in use of relational language may be one reason that
members of intercultural pairs rate one another less positively than members of same
culture pairs.
Negotiation and Conflict Resolution
In any kind of teamwork, disagreements will arise among team members and between
team members and outside groups and organizations, which need to be resolved via
negotiation and conflict resolution. These disagreements can be resolved in a variety
of ways, ranging from techniques that try to build consensus to techniques that try to
get one's own way forcibly. The cultural background of leaders and managers from
different cultures has been shown to shape their preferences among these negotiation
tactics (Ting-Toomey et al. 1991; Adair and Brett 2005). Leaders from collectivistic,
high-context cultures typically prefer relational strategies involving compromise and
the identification of shared priorities, whereas leaders from individualistic, low-context
culture typically prefer informational strategies such as formal argumentation and verbal
domination of the conversation. These differences have been attributed to cultural
variation in concern for one's own face versus the other person's face (Ting-Toomey
1988).
The effectiveness of a leader's own preferred styles of negotiation and conflict
resolution will vary depending on the cultural background of the people with whom he or
she is negotiating. People who share a cultural background also share preferences for
certain types of negotiation strategies such as compromising versus dominating (Ting-
Toomey et al. 1991; Adair and Brett 2005) that may make them more effective with
partners of their own culture versus another culture.
The considerations outlined previously can make negotiation and conflict resolution
very tricky for leaders interacting in an intercultural sphere. While leaders can learn new
styles of negotiation, that alone may not suffice because members of other cultures may
deem it inappropriate for them to use relational strategies. In other words, the norms
as they would apply to a same-culture manager do not translate to an other-culture
manager, who is perceived to be in a different role (Hofstede 1983). In addition, within
the leader's own team, it would be difficult to adjust one's negotiation style to meet the
norms and expectations of every group member.
Summary
Cultural diversity introduces many challenges for leadership and teamwork in science
and engineering teams. The cultural background of leaders and team members can
influence important aspects of teamwork, including interpersonal communication,
coordination of task activities, negotiation and conflict resolution, and the establishment
of good working relationships. When there are problems in any of these areas of
teamwork, both task-oriented and [p. 260
] relationship-oriented outcomes can

suffer. Teams may not be able to conduct their research and development activities
in a timely fashion, and team members may come to resent one another. The next
section describes some strategies leaders and managers can use to overcome these
challenges.
Overcoming Challenges to Leading
Culturally Diverse Teams
Leaders and managers can take several steps to address the challenges of directing
multicultural science and engineering teams. First, they can provide training, and
become trained themselves, about cultural differences. With greater awareness of
these differences, there can be greater understanding of one another's perspectives,
values, and expectations on group work. Awareness of cultural differences also allows
leaders to make good choices about the mechanics of teamwork in their teams, such
as choosing interaction styles and information technology that minimize the potential
influences of cultural differences.
Training
One valuable approach to improving leadership and teamwork in multicultural science
and engineering teams is through cultural training (Littrell and Salas 2005). There are
two general categories of training: culture-specific training and diversity awareness
training. Culture-specific training is often tailored to people who expect to spend
significant time in a foreign culture. The goal is for trainees to be familiar with the norms,
values, customs, expectations, and other key behavioral patterns of a specific culture.
Diversity training is meant to heighten people's appreciation for the fact that certain
norms and values vary across cultures and provide people with cultural intelligence that
allows them to interact successfully with people from a broad array of cultures (Earley
and Ang 2003). In most cases, leaders will want to provide a little of both: enough
diversity training for people to learn to think reflectively about cultural differences, and
then some culture-specific training on the specific cultural groups represented in their
team.
A goal of diversity training is to observe the potential role of culture, in general, and
identify points in the interaction or scenario where differing cultural backgrounds could
lead to differing interpretations of the situation, communication, or possibilities for
action. The individual need not know a colleague's specific cultural framework but
will instead be more likely to look to differences in perspective (rather than ability,
cooperativeness, etc.) as a contributing factor in conflicts or confusion, creating a more
positive group outlook.
For culture-specific training, a variety of educational methods has been used, including
tutors, classes, immersive experiences, and text-based exercises. Although immersion
is generally considered the most successful, it is also the least feasible for most
collaborative teams, as it would require people to spend significant time living and
working within the cultures of each of their collaborators. Today, virtual worlds such as
Second Life or World of Warcraft offer more feasible ways to achieve virtual immersion
in foreign cultures. One might spend extended time in parts of these worlds populated
predominantly by members of another culture, such as the virtual Tokyo section of
Second Life, or serve in an international guild in World of Warcraft. Language barriers
remain a problem for virtual immersion, but new tools such as Google Translate may
eventually be accurate enough to support smooth interlingual communication.
Attribution training, based on a series of text-based exercises, is a more feasible
method to teach individuals to evaluate situations and behavior from another culture's
point of view. The notion behind attribution training is that by providing people with
a cognitive framework for understanding the behavior of people from other cultures,
people can learn to make appropriate attributions for these behaviors rather than
interpreting them in light of their own culture.
One popular type of attribution training is cultural assimilators (Cushner and Brislin
1996). Cultural assimilators consist of a set of stories situated within a specific culture,
followed by multiple-choice questions whose answers offer alternative explanations
(attributions) for the event. After choosing an answer, readers are then provided with
the correct answer as well as with explanations for why that answer is correct and each
of the other alternatives is incorrect. For example, a reader might be presented with
a scenario in which a team member from a particular culture fails to speak up after
observing the group leader making a critical mistake. Among the options for attributions
for this event might be that it is culturally inappropriate to challenge the leader under
any circumstances. In general, culture assimilators can facilitate learning about other
cultures and reduce people's uncertainty in intercultural interactions (Mitchell et al.
1972).
Cultural training by way of assimilators can be valuable for leaders of U.S. science and
engineering teams. However, despite the many training books available, it can be hard
for a leader to find the precise questions that would be useful for his or her team. It can
be necessary to develop new scenarios with the help of members of the target cultures
that are tailored specifically to the research environment. Leaders should also keep in
mind that the foreign members of the team may need similar training to understand U.S.
culture. In an interview study of foreign students studying at a U.S. university, Leslie
D. Setlock and Susan R. Fussell (2010) found that these foreign students reported
feeling anxiety based on their lack of knowledge of what was considered appropriate
and inappropriate in their host country.
Team Interaction Strategies
A second strategy that leaders can take is to address the challenges of leading
multicultural groups to make informed [p. 261
] choices about group collaboration

strategies that reduce the impact of cultural differences. Leaders have considerable
leeway to identify preferred strategies of interaction within the team and to adjust
these as needed to accommodate cultural differences. For instance, they can decide
what balance of formal meetings versus informal interaction they want to rely on for
team coordination. They can also choose between highly structured processes for
group meetings (e.g., a clear agenda with speakers identified for each segment of
the meeting) and less structured interactions in which team members contribute as
they see fit. An added benefit of making team interaction strategies explicit is that this
explicitness can help members who came to the team with different mental models of
teamwork develop a common understanding of roles, power and status hierarchies, and
team procedures that they can rely on for future coordination.
In some cases, leaders may also want to implement special procedures to address
cultural issues. For example, as discussed previously, people from high-power-
distance cultures may be reluctant to disagree with leaders in public, even when such
disagreement could be valuable to team progress. To address this issue, a leader might
provide an anonymous way to contribute to team discussions. Similarly, when trying
to generate group consensus, a leader of a team with members from cultures wherein
disagreement is typically indicated by silence rather than overt statements might want
to implement a decision-making system that requires people (possibly anonymously) to
indicate yes or no. There are no simple rules for deciding which interaction strategies
will work best; rather, the leader needs to take into account the cultural backgrounds of
the members of his or her team.
Appropriate Collaboration Tools
In many science and engineering teams today, significant proportions of the
communication and task work occur via information technology. As with team
dynamics, leaders will want to consider the different needs of people from other cultural
backgrounds when choosing IT for team interaction.
One important consideration is whether a technology facilitates communication across
cultural boundaries. For some multicultural teams, text-based tools such as e-mail or
IM that afford reviewing others messages over time and revising one's own responses
as they are being produced (Clark and Brennan 1991) can be preferable to real-time
tools such as audio or video conferencing. These tools are valuable because they
allow team members extra time to process others messages. Indeed, some studies
have found that cultural differences in communication styles are much smaller in text-
based media in comparison with richer media (Setlock et al. 2004). At the same time,
however, these leaner media do not support high-context communication well because
many situational aspects of communication have been removed. It can be hard for high-
context communicators to gauge listeners responses when they cannot see or hear
them.
Interviews with foreign students currently enrolled in U.S. schools have also found that
interviewees from relationship-oriented cultures such as China and Korea report giving
more thought to how their media choices may affect interpersonal relationships and
what social norms or expectations may be involved in the choice (Setlock and Fussell
2010). For example, Asian students mentioned that they were reluctant to drop by a
professor's office without establishing previously via e-mail or IM that this would be
acceptable, whereas U.S.-born students felt that this behavior was perfectly acceptable.
The area of technology to support multicultural teams is a growing one, and leaders
of the future may have new choices of tools that are specifically designed to improve
intercultural communication by providing feedback about a partner's intended meaning,
by adding real-time translation tools that allow non-native speakers to converse more
fluently with their English-speaking partners.
Conclusion
Science and engineering teams in the United States are increasingly diverse in
the cultural backgrounds of their memberships. This chapter has presented some
dimensions along which cultures have been shown to varyindividualism versus
collectivism, high versus low context of communication, task versus relationship focus,
and power distanceand shown how differences along these dimensions can present
challenges to leaders both within their own team and in the wider discipline in which
they are striving to achieve their goals. These challenges can be addressed, at least to
some extent, by training, and the problems can be minimized by thoughtful selection of
team interaction styles and information technology.
One way in which research has been limited to date is that most investigators have
evaluated teamwork among groups with members from only a handful of cultures.
As science and engineering teams become larger and as the student population
in these disciplines in academic institutions becomes even more culturally diverse,
new approaches may be needed to lead multicultural teams. Coleadership by
individuals from more than one cultural background could be a promising approach.
Alternatively, even greater emphasis could be placed on enculturating people into
specific organizational cultures in hopes that a shared culture at the organizational level
could surmount differences among members in terms of their national or ethnic cultures.
Finally, new media such as virtual worlds can help familiarize people with a wide range
of cultures in lieu of actual physical immersion in other cultures. These experiences may
lead to a new generation of leaders and team members who are familiar with a broad
range of cultural norms, values, and expectations.
[p. 262
]
Susan R.Fussell Leslie D.Setlock
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Leadership in Science and

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] differed as a function of whether both members of

] relationship-oriented outcomes can

] choices about group collaboration

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