00:00:05
yeah so This research was really motivated by the idea that multinationals as we know it's a fact
00:00:11
use lots and lots of teams right to get their work done but multinational teams struggle to really succeed um and we
00:00:17
know that is a big problem um in these in lots of organizations so one of the big things they really struggle with is
00:00:23
you've got people all around the world people don't share their information
00:00:25
their knowledge enough with each other as much as they could right so we're trying to figure out why is that and
00:00:30
what are some of the problems that these teams face and how can they be overcome
00:00:33
so the particular focus of this study is on the fact that these teams are so diverse right so when you've got a
00:00:39
multinational team it has people we talk about four different kinds of diversity
00:00:43
we've got people from different Geographic locations all different countries around the world we've got
00:00:47
people of different nationalities we've got people who work in different parts
00:00:51
of their organizations right different um parts of the organizational structure we call them structural differences so
00:00:56
people who work in different divisions or business units or functional areas and people are demographically diverse
00:01:01
some people are older than others some people have been in the organization longer than other so lots of different
00:01:04
kinds of differences so the question that we focus on in this um particular research is which of these differences
00:01:11
actually matter for sharing knowledge in these teams and moreover which of them matter most um so that's the real focus
00:01:17
of the study that's the research question and to address it what we did is we um collected survey data original
00:01:24
survey data from U more than 2,000 members of around 289 teams so almost 200 0 teams in one very very large
00:01:32
multinational it's a very well-known multinational organization more than 100,000 employees around the world and
00:01:37
we collected data on all the differences between the members of these teams and we um did a lot of research to
00:01:41
understand which differences matter most um and also how might they be overcome and in particular we looked at whether
00:01:47
the people knew each other and had worked together before as one of the things that might help them to overcome
00:01:51
those kinds of differences so again the the real question is which differences matter
00:01:59
most so we're looking at these four kinds of differences Geographic uh um nationality based structural differences
00:02:05
working different parts of the organizational structure and demographic differences and what we found was that
00:02:10
two of these kinds of differences mattered much more than the other two and in particular Geographic differences
00:02:15
really mattered so working in different countries um and uh structural differences mattered so working in
00:02:21
different parts of the organizational structure and when I say they mattered it means they created barriers to
00:02:26
knowledge seeking within this team for people going and asking each other for help or for information related to their
00:02:30
work nationality differences um and demographic differences also mattered they also created barriers between the
00:02:36
team members but not so big so the ones that were really big were the geographic
00:02:40
differences and the structural differences and they created the greatest barriers but the good news was
00:02:44
that if you'd work together before in a team so we're looking at sort of the
00:02:47
diads of pairs of people within the team if you'd work together before you could
00:02:50
get over some to some extent those Geographic and structural barriers so those were the key findings
00:03:00
I think probably the most striking finding and it kind of emerged really early on as we were looking at at the
00:03:05
data here um was the importance of structural differences organizational structure so when you think about uh
00:03:12
multinational teams you know there's a lot of attention on the fact that people
00:03:14
work in different parts of the world and their different nationalities um but you
00:03:18
know we know that this is true we just don't think about it multinational teams
00:03:21
so much these people are also coming from different parts of the organization usually and we found this was a really
00:03:26
strong to some extent the strongest um barrier so the fact that people worked in different divisions in the
00:03:31
organization or different functional areas or different business units again it was a huge complex organization those
00:03:36
were really problematic um for those those kinds of uh differences were really problematic for the members of
00:03:42
those teams and I think that was the most surprising to us given that the focus is usually on the nationality and
00:03:46
the geographic stuff I think part of it is um recognizing the real variety of differences that there are right and I
00:03:57
think you know we tend to focus a lot on specific ones like we know that the fact
00:04:00
that we're in different time zones is really a big problem right and that's
00:04:02
part of different Geographic locations um we know that the fact that people speak different languages is a big deal
00:04:07
right and so managers tend to focus on some of these most obvious things that are really Salient when you're when
00:04:12
you're internationally um dispersed um but the structural stuff for example which we found to be you know
00:04:18
surprisingly important um we don't think about as much in in a global team so I
00:04:22
think for managers it's being really aware that there's a very wide variety
00:04:25
of differences that you need to pay attention to and monitor if you really want people to be sharing knowledge as
00:04:29
much as they could be um inside the teams again on the plus side um for managers though if you've got people who
00:04:35
worked together before that can help right so when managers are composing their teams it suggests that really
00:04:40
paying attention to that we know there's lots of good things about people um
00:04:44
having worked together in the past but often we don't put people that worked
00:04:47
together in the past because we're trying to you know get the best team for that particular project we tend to
00:04:50
downplay that criteria but I think managers um you know could benefit a lot the research suggested they could
00:04:55
benefit a lot from really paying attention to trying to get people um who know each other a little bit already
00:05:04
I think probably the uh most important one and there is one in particular I think is that nationality is not so
00:05:12
important in our findings um at least then again it's not that nationality differences don't matter also
00:05:18
nationality being where you were born where you come from as well as your native language right and they do create
00:05:24
those kinds of differences we come from different countries originally that creates a barrier to knowledge seeking
00:05:28
between us but what we is a much less important barrier than the fact that we may be in different countries um so if
00:05:34
we're in the same country and we're different nationalities it's actually
00:05:36
not a very big deal if we're in different countries even if we're the same nationality that's a big deal um so
00:05:42
you know there's a lot of attention again on multinational teams we tend to focus a lot on these kind of
00:05:46
crosscultural differences and and and nationality based differences in fact our research suggests if you compare
00:05:51
them to other kinds of differences they they matter but not as much as some of this other stuff in terms of geography
00:05:56
or organizational structure seems to matter more so most of the research in this area is
00:06:04
a lot of research on teams um there and there's some research not as much obviously on multinational teams most of
00:06:10
the research tends to focus on one or two kinds of differences right so most of that research will say nationality
00:06:16
differences matter look we find it matters or Geographic differences a lot of research on geographically dispersed
00:06:21
teams right that matters but um I'm not aware of any studies really that have
00:06:25
pulled together as many different kinds of differences and said well if you look
00:06:28
at them all together we agree they all matter we find they all do matter and actually create barriers within teams um
00:06:34
but look some of them matter quite a bit more than others when you're able to
00:06:37
compare them side by side so I think that's one of the things that's probably
00:06:40
most distinctive in terms of what our study has been able to do uh the other aspect of it is that we have a large
00:06:45
sample of teams um that we're able to compare so around 290 teams 20,000 you
00:06:50
know team members and we're looking at all the individual uh you know the pairs
00:06:54
within those teams so that's a much larger and richer data set with lots of different differ is going on in there
00:07:00
than then the prior research has has often tackled uh so my co-author Jonathan Cummings and I um both do a lot of
00:07:11
research related to uh teams in large complex organizations like large multinationals um and collaboration more
00:07:18
generally across these kinds of organizations uh so you know one of the things that I'm most interested in is
00:07:23
what are the conditions that enable teams to be more effective right and in this case particularly multinational
00:07:29
teams so certainly thinking about uh you know teams do have these kinds of differences
00:07:34
usually we can't make those go away right so what are the conditions that can help those teams to be more
00:07:40
successful and not just in terms of being able to share knowledge effectively but also you know what makes
00:07:45
them more Innovative um what makes them you know more efficient or more able to implement um their their projects or
00:07:50
their programs successfully so that's where the main focus is of this work going forward
00:07:58
[Music]