Team Conflict Management, Interdependence and Effective Communication in a Cultural Diverse Workplace

Name of Organization: Breville Group Limited

Website: https://brevillegroup.com

 

 

 

Executive Summary

The main aim of this report is to respond to issues that relate to team conflict management, interdependence, and effective communication in a culturally diverse workplace. Breville Group Limited is an organization that will be used to relate to these issues. The main sections in the report are, concepts relating to leadership and cultural diversity, cultural diversity in relation to Breville Group Limited, the analysis of the findings, and the recommendation.

For the report, the academic search process was used to find articles that contained information that was relevant to the information needed for the report. From the articles, it is clear that team conflict, interdependence, and effective communication in a culturally diverse workplace are major issues that are faced by both the managers and the employees. Poor communication and lack of cultural competency from the managers are factors that create team conflict since they lack the knowledge of handling the employees. These findings mean that for a culturally diverse workplace to thrive, in terms of conflict management, interdependence, and effective communication, managers need to gain knowledge and skills to understand how to handle the culturally diverse employees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

Breville Group Limited is a company that is part of the household appliance manufacturing industry that provides electrical appliances in the consumer products industry. It operates through two-segment which are global product and distribution. The global products offer premium products that are developed by the Breville brand and are sold internationally. Breville invests in product expansion abilities whereby they recruit, train, and develop marketers, engineers, and industrial inventors. This report aims to respond to issues that relate to team conflict management, interdependence, and effective communication which are significant elements in such a company that deals with culturally diverse workers. In such a company that employs a lot of workers with different backgrounds in their different sectors, conflict, poor communication is inevitable. The company’s management ought to come up with an organizational culture that is designed to prevent conflict and enhance communication as much as possible. Designing policies that are clear, consistent, and inclusive of every person will help to manage workplace conflicts and enhance communication.

Method

For the report, I used the academic search database to find relevant articles. The terms I used were “responding to issues relating to team conflict management and interdependence and effective communication in a culturally diverse workplace”. I included the year that I wanted the article to be so it could fit my search because I wanted one that was not published older than 5 years. I looked at the title of the article to choose the relevant one. I narrowed down my search by looking for a journal article that was peer-reviewed because they are more reliable and contain a lot of information. Through the abstract from the articles, I read through to know if the article had information that I needed for my report. I chose these articles because they contain information that I needed and which is relevant to my report topic.

Concepts relating to leadership and cultural diversity

Due to the continued globalization which has attracted an increase in culturally diverse employees, leadership in the workplace has been faced with different issues that are connected to multicultural team conflicts. Diversity is defined as the differences in a group regarding an attribute on which people can be different from or resemble each other. Cultural values, beliefs, physical appearances, language accents, work behavior are some of the differences that can cause workplace conflict among diverse employees (Sogancilar & Ors, 2018). Other significant differences and differences that multicultural teams face are language barriers, ineffective communication, and different styles of communication. This causes miscommunication in the team which undermines the growth of the team. Cultural diversity has brought about multicultural teams in the workplace changing the work environment which has both negative and positive outcomes.

 Multicultural teams have had their fair share of challenges for leaders and employees as well. To know how to handle these challenges, the leaders have to understand how to effectively lead multicultural teams and how to solve the challenges being faced in the workplace due to cultural diversity. Studies show that managing cross-cultural differences is a serious issue faced in many companies (Sogancilar & Ors, 2018). This is because culture intensely influences the manager’s attitude, interrelations in the workplace amidst other activities. With this in mind, it is clear to depict that serious issues arise in a work environment where individuals from culturally diverse backgrounds are working together. The attitude of a company towards diversity can be thought of to be influenced by the way a manager handles it and how he perceives the advantages and disadvantages of these differences. Some managers undervalue cultural diversity and try ending it in their organizations. Others take those differences as an advantage to the organization and use them to enhance the performance of the organization through their diverse knowledge and skill. Managers can encourage and support cultural diversity in an organization and therefore as a leader determines the outcome of diverse employees.

This is because leaders facilitate the functioning of the multicultural teams and through this, they determine whether diversity affects teams positively or negatively. Cultural intelligence for leaders is an important aspect in a culturally diverse workplace because it enables the leaders to work with multicultural teams. Cultural intelligence can act as a moderator of diversity in the workplace which will help the leaders to handle most of the issues and conflicts. To expedite favorable team processes in a diverse culture and promote team interdependence, cultural expertise is important for leaders (Rosenauer et al., 2016). Cultural intelligence consists of motivation and self-efficient beliefs in regards to multicultural situations, efficient behavior adaptation, and knowledge about cultural differences. These components enable individuals to know how to act in cross-cultural situations. Leaders with high cultural intelligence are more effective while working with culturally diverse employees and shape the team’s and organization’s response to diversity. A leader’s cultural intelligence is positively related to the ratings of the team member’s proficiency and leader efficiency. Leaders who are culturally intelligent like to interact with culturally diverse individuals and are mindful of the cultural differences. This makes them consider differences when deciding upon an issue or a person. Leaders that have little cultural intelligence on the other hand have less diversity awareness are tend to rely on nationality as a prompt to group their team members. This creates room for unfair treatment and team conflict in a culturally diverse workplace.

Cultural diversity in relation to Breville Group Limited

Breville Group Limited is an organization that is involved in designing, developing, branding, marketing, and distributing products. For all these processes to be effectively accomplished, it involves a lot of work and this means a lot of employees too. Breville is an organization that is committed to moral, responsible, and viable conducts and are determined to create a culture that increases their contribution to society. Cultural diversity for the organization is inevitable because it is a global organization meaning that it attracts even culturally diverse employees. It is an organization that has lasted for a long time and therefore understands the impact of culturally diverse employees and their contribution to the organization. Breville Group Limited is an organization that focuses on the creativity of their products and this involves teamwork and interdependence to achieve the uniqueness of their products. According to Rosenauer et al., (2016), task interdependence requires close collaboration and practical teamwork and provides the basis for diversity to develop its impacts on team performance. Breville is a successful organization and has remained relevant for many years. This shows that it has effective management and this includes the culturally competent leaders who can communicate effectively with the employees because poor communication leads to misunderstanding and therefore poor performance. Culturally intelligent leaders possess the necessary attitudes, skills, and knowledge to deal with cultural diversity in the workplace. They know how to handle multi-cultural teams effectively and therefore enhance the company’s performance. Apart from Breville being a successful organization, it also recruits, trains, and develops marketers, engineers, and industrial inventors globally. All these processes require interdependence from the employees so that they can be accomplished and the leaders, they require to have the right knowledge on how to handle any issues or conflicts that may arise. The close interaction of the team members helps them integrate their skills and ideas to find a solution and culturally diverse employees have broad and different ideas which when put together work perfectly for the organization. Leaders need to encourage more cultural diversity in the organization for successful results.

Analysis of conflict management in a culturally diverse workplace

Effective communication in culturally diverse teams is a big problem that causes misunderstanding to occur. When there is a misunderstanding, conflicts are bound to arise. Lack of awareness about diversity for the managers and the team members can easily lead to conflicts because different cultures have different working styles and expectations. When there is poor communication and both the manager and the team members are not aware of the difference in cultures, apart from the conflict, the team members will underperform. Therefore, the manager must know how to handle culturally diverse employees to avoid these conflicts and enhance performance (Rosenauer et al., 2016). With the increase of culturally diverse employees in organizations, the leaders have to learn how to handle each person differently and understand the different cultures. The manager should embrace diversity and create a work environment that encourages team members to acknowledge diversity to promote interdependence in the team. The manager has to create positive or negative working relations among culturally diverse team members by how they handle diversity. Cultural intelligence is a vital tool that many ought to have because it helps them clearly understand an individual and their culture, know how to communicate to them effectively to avoid misunderstanding, and the approach and style to use for different individuals.

Recommendations

Based on my findings, managers need to learn how to be culturally competent to avoid conflicts that come about due to misunderstanding. They should be competent enough to adopt different management styles and should always want to learn more to be the best. This way they will have the ability to understand each individual’s needs. They need to encourage workers on the significance of cultural diversity and the positive impact it has on the organization’s performance if utilized properly. Effective communication should be practiced to ensure that there each part clearly understands the other. Being a diverse employee in itself is challenging and therefore, a manager should be considerate, patient, one who could be approached easily and one who interacts with the employees on the challenges they are facing and is ready to listen to them and come up with a solution. This encourages the employees and makes them feel valued and through this, performance is enhanced. A manager needs to keep improving on the cultural diversity knowledge and skills to keep up with the team members and learn the different styles to use in handling them and conflicts in case they arise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

Breville (2018). Retrieved from https://brevillegroup.com

Rosenauer, D., Homan, A.C., Horstmeier, C.A. and Voelpel, S.C., 2016. Managing nationality

diversity: The interactive effect of leaders’ cultural intelligence and task interdependence. British Journal of Management, 27(3), pp.628-645.

Sogancilar, N. and Ors, H., UNDERSTANDING THE CHALLENGES OF MULTICULTURAL

TEAM MANAGEMENT. Journal of Business Economics and Finance, 7(3), pp.259-268.