Building an Effective Global Business Team

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Mastering the management of a global business team calls for confronting several unique challenges that tend to exacerbate the more common problems facing all teams, point out authors Vijay Govindarajan, director of the Center for Global Leadership at Dartmouth College's Tuck School, and Anil Gupta, a professor of strategy and global e-business at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. Of the 70 global business teams studied by the authors, about one-third rated their performances as largely unsuccessful. How can companies reverse the generally weak performance of faltering global teams? The authors' survey of 58 senior executives from five U.S. and four European multinational organizations reveals some hard-earned insights that may benefit your cross-border endeavors. When global business teams fail, it is often due to a lack of trust among team members. As a result, executives guiding global teams must institute processes that emphasize the cultivation of trust. Also high on the list of culpable factors are the hindrances to communication that geographical, cultural, and language differences cause. Even in the case of teams whose members speak the same language, differences in semantics, accents, tone, pitch, and dialects can be impediments. To mitigate the corrosive effects of these cross-cultural impediments, executives are advised to craft a cross-border team's charter, composition, and process carefully--with each aspect equally emphasized. The authors elaborate on how these work holistically to increase the odds that your global business teams will become high-performing sources of invaluable multinational experience leading to competitive advantage.

• Diversity and inclusion
• Teams
• Leadership
• Business communication
• Cross-cultural business relations
• Organizational structure and design