Project Management Deployment – the Role of Cultural Factors

Abstract

In the first part, this report gives an overview of Early’s and Mosakowski’s article about hybrid team cultures and the effects of heterogeneity in transnational teams. First the existing literature about this topic will be introduced, while explaining how the analysis of these literatures and their own observations and scientific findings leads to the release of their main hypotheses. This will be followed by a short description how the authors article have challenged the current state of the art with their research. After that the optimal degree of team heterogeneity will be explained. This part explains what the benefits of knowing the optimal degree of team heterogeneity are and gives a practical example for it. Finally the results of the authors study number 2 will be explained and summarised in one sentence.

1. Overview

Early’s and Mosakowski’s article examines the effects of heterogeneity in transnational teams. According to the authors, in the extant literature, there are three literatures which inform study of the impact of heterogeneity on team effectiveness. The first is the organizational demography literature (O'Reilly, Caldwell and Barnett, 1989) which shows that team similarity is positively associated with team effectiveness (Hambrick and Mason, 1984). This is followed by the cultural diversity literature, which says that the benefits of cultural diversity are attributed to the variety of traits that diverse team members contribute (Maznevski, 1994). The third literature deals with team composition effects and concludes that small amounts of heterogeneity can enhance team functioning (Nemeth, 1986). Integrating these three perspectives, the authors argue that giving sufficient opportunity to work together, homogeneous and highly heterogeneous teams will be more efficient than moderately heterogeneous ones.

While developing a theory they argued that a hybrid team culture consists inter alia of work capability expectations that individuals within a team share. According to them hybrid teams can achieve a strong team culture under specific conditions and that effective teams posses this team culture because shared member expectations facilitate performance and communication.

After that, Early and Mosakowski considered three types of team heterogeneity: high homogeneity, moderate heterogeneity and high heterogeneity. By their definition a highly homogeneous team is one in which all members perceive themselves as sharing key salient characteristics (Lau and Murnighan, 1998). A moderately heterogeneous team is one in which members perceive differences among themselves that are based on few salient features that distinguish subgroups (Lau and Murnighan, 1998) and finally a highly heterogeneous team is one in which nearly all members differ from other members on salient traits. While describing the way the teams communicate with each other, they noticed that unlike a homogeneous or moderately heterogeneous team, a highly heterogeneous team cannot easily fall back on a preexisting or on subgroup identities. As a consequence, when external demands confront a highly heterogeneous team, it must form the mentioned hybrid team culture to move forward, although this requires significant time and effort (Lau and Murnighan, 1998).

According to their suggestion teams with unified cultures are likely to perform better than other teams. The reason for this is that a unified culture facilitates internal communication (Oetzel, 1995), coordination (Hackman, 1987), cohesiveness (Klimoski and Mohammed, 1994) and team efficacy (Bandura, 1997). These 2

unified cultures will be developed by a homogenous and a highly heterogeneous team. The difference is that in a homogeneous team the culture will develop shortly after formation, while in a highly heterogeneous team after the members had sufficient time and opportunity to form a common basis of exchange and interaction. Due to wider research they figured out that before other traits, such as race, gender, religion and profession, nationality is the primary status-determining trait and therefore, most important for perceived heterogeneity in transnational teams (Hambrick and Mason, 1984). By virtue of this knowledge the authors hypothesized that team heterogeneity on nationality affects team-related outcome variables such as performance and other crucial factors.

On the basis of the mentioned scientific findings Early and Mosakowski released two main Hypotheses. The first one posits that teams that are homogeneous on member nationality will outperform moderately or highly heterogeneous teams on critical punctuated and on deadline imposed tasks. The second one posits that there will be a curvilinear relationship between team heterogeneity on nationality and team outcomes. This means that homogeneous and highly heterogeneous teams will perform better than moderately heterogeneous team in long-term tasks.

While testing these two hypotheses with various teams, the results of their first Study suggested that the creation of a unified team culture depends upon several conditions such as establishment of rules for interpersonal and task related interactions, creation of high team performance expectations or effective communication and conflict management styles. Facing these results they proposed a third hypothesis about the process variables behind the team heterogeneity effect saying that the relationship of team member heterogeneity to performance and member satisfaction will be mediated by members’ shared identity, team efficacy, expectations and intrateam communication.

2. Challenging the state of the art

Existing researches about team dynamics have so far (until the year 2000) focused on dynamics of teams with multicultural and multinational members (e.g. Lawrence, 1997). Early and Mosakowski put these researches in a global context and analyzed which roles factores like nationalities, races, religions genders, etc plays a role in team heterogeneity. They also argued that recent works on transnational team effectivenes has focused on the importance of the culture emerging from team interaction. Based on this, they released the thesis that an effective team is one with a strong team culture. Considering the two main hypotheses the results of the studies showed that over time, the 3

impact of heterogeneity on team performance became curvilinear. This is consistent with Elrons (1997) studies of effects of cultural heterogeneity on top management teams within multinational corporations. However, their article provided a new perspective on the black box of demography which is part of the earlier mentioned organizational demography literature as described by Lawrence (1997). In this literature Lawrence