Conference: Advancing Team Effectiveness in a Globalized World; Michigan State University, October 8-10, 2015

Michigan State University, East Lansing MI

Investigators

Abstract

Nontechnical Description of Significance and Importance A variety of global forces unfolding over the last two decades have pushed organizations world-wide to restructure work around teams to harness diverse expertise for innovation and to enable more rapid, flexible, and adaptive responses. The dual needs of innovation and adaptability make teams the focus for skill development, knowledge sharing, and action. Moreover, the push toward collaboration and teamwork is global, as critical expertise is sought wherever it is located. Aided by technology, virtual teaming is ubiquitous. This has increased the diversity of team members and the heterogeneity of their cultural and ethnic backgrounds. This places primary emphasis on melding diversity and minimizing the potential for fragmentation, subgroup formation, and faultlines that fracture teams. Modern work teams are increasingly global, multicultural, and virtual. Given the increasing prominence of multicultural teams, one would expect that there would be a strong scientific foundation and conferences devoted to this topic, but that is not the case. There are literatures on culture and diversity, but they are not team centric. There are well-developed literatures on composing, training and developing, leading, and managing teams, but a focus on multicultural issues and their implications for team effectiveness theory and research is diffuse. This represents a significant gap in the literature. The purpose of the conference is to surface key conceptual gaps, synthesize differing perspectives, and advance an agenda for theory development and research to enhance multicultural team effectiveness. Multicultural team effectiveness encompasses important substantive topics of culture, diversity, and team effectiveness. Integrating these topics advances broader scientific and societal concerns as well. Recent research shows that science and engineering are increasingly collaborative and cross-disciplinary, and that collaborative science has more impact. Collaborative science entails multicultural teams. Advancing knowledge of how to ensure the success of multicultural teams will also advance diversity in science and technology. Technical Description There is a clear need to develop a more integrated understanding of the effects of culture and diversity across the spectrum of topics relevant to forming, developing, and leading effective teams. The fragmented literature necessitates theoretical integration, new research to close knowledge gaps, and the development of innovative applications to aid teamwork in multicultural contexts. The conference is designed to advance this integration by (a) targeting key experts across core topic areas (i.e., culture, diversity, team training, team leadership, and team effectiveness); (b) having them share their knowledge and insights on new developments across core topics; and (c) engaging them and diverse conference participants in interactive, focused discussion sessions to integrate ideas, identify gaps, and propose promising directions for synthesis, theory development, and new research. This approach will help to integrate this fragmented literature and to organize a coherent framework for conceptual progress, research advancement, and practical applications to improve multicultural team effectiveness. In addition, products from the conference will be publically available. Presentation materials and consented videos of presentations will be available for downloading from the Consortium for Multicultural Psychology Research (CMPR) website at the Department of Psychology, Michigan State University.