I was reading an article the other day named "Building an Effective Global Business Team" in the online edition of MIT-Sloan. I thought you might be interested because international business is important to all of us and some of you may even become a part of an international team in the future.
First of all, what is an international team?
Basically what it says is that those teams are cross-border teams of individuals of different nationalities, working in different cultures, businesses and functions, who come together to coordinate some aspects of the multinational operation on a global basis. They are myriad organizational mechanisms that global corporations can use to integrate widespread operations. Those teams play an important part for every global company's competitive advantage because it depends on its ability to coordinate critical resources and information that are spread across the whole world.
It is also mentioned that it is nearly impossible to manage a multinational corporation successful without a sovereign global team. Creating a capable international team is, however, easier said than done. The article references to one of their studies, where they discovered that only 18 % considered their performance "highly successful" and the remaining 82 % fell short of their intended goals. What shocked me most was that in fact, fully one-third of the teams in their sample rated their performance as largely unsuccessful. The corporations have to understand the obstacles to success that global business teams confront. Then they can take concrete steps to avoid those mistakes and build effective and efficient teams.Further the article talks about why global business teams fail.
International teams and global teams are plagued by many of the same problems - a shortage of the necessary knowledge and skills, a lack of clarity regarding team objectives, to name a few. But global business teams face additional challenges resulting from differences in geography, language and culture. It's important that the teams break down the communication barriers and solve the other difficulties. Those challenges tend to exacerbate the more common problems all teams face.
What do you think about this topic?
Here is the link to the original article:
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/building-an-effective-global-business-team/
Wordbank:
multinational = multinational
myriad = vielzählig
corporations = Unternehmen
widespread = verstreute
intended = beabsichtigten
competitive advantage = Wettbewerbsvorteil
plagued = geplagt
shortage = Mangel
exacerbate = verdrängen
Regards,
Katja :)
