Pan-European Teamwork

The group of managing and marketing directors from nine national subsidiaries of a large international company had gathered in a European capital city for a three-day meeting with a dual purpose.

Their primary task was to draw up a pan-European marketing strategy to exploit the EC's single market. The meeting was also seen as an opportunity for the executives to learn about working within a multicultural team, and to recognise how it differed from their team-working back home.

As with many multicultural groups, the first difficulties emerged over language. The meeting was conducted in English, but not all the participants were equally fluent or confident about expressing themselves. Not surprisingly, native English speakers dominated the early discussions, until the facilitator asked others for their ideas.
This intervention, however, only exposed another cultural trait that impeded progress. Impatient with the time it took others to formulate their views, British and US participants frequently interrupted the long periods of silent contemplation with even more suggestions of their own. To construct coherent arguments in a non-native language takes time and requires concentration. The use of only one language was the most obvious barrier to multicultural teamworking. As the working session progressed, however, the comments made and ideas proposed revealed how unconscious cultural biases and corporate myths dominated the participants' thinking.

The members of this multicultural team, brought together for the first time, reacted like all human beings: In the absence of more reliable information, they made liberal use of preconceived stereotypes about the nations they did not know. Or where they had some experience, they generalised by using one past incident to predict the behaviour of that nationality.

At the end all the participants acknowledged the pain of learning, and the importance of more accurate perceptions in putting together a draft marketing strategy.

This text is based on an article from 'International management'.