Managing Multicultural Teams

This assignment analyzes the challenges of managing multicultural teams within an Australian firm. It emphasizes the importance of building trust through transformational leadership, open communication, and clear performance standards. The document recommends implementing Cultural Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence, and Diversity Management programs to foster a cohesive and productive work environment.

Running head: EI, CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE AND DIVERSITY
Emotional Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence and Diversity
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author’s Note:

1EI, CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE AND DIVERSITY
Executive Summary
This report is about an Australian firm which has to manage multicultural teams from
geographically diverse countries. The Australian firm is facing like high employee turnover, low
employee morale and low productivity. The strategies adopted by global firms like McDonald’s
and Asiana airlines to manage multicultural teams are summarized in the report. Analysis of the
key issues of the Australian firm is provided and the best practices which the Australian firm can
adopt from the strategies of McDonald’s and Asiana airlines are analyzed. It is recommended
that the Australian firm must embrace and implement the Cultural Intelligence, Emotional
Intelligence and Diversity Management programs which can resolve most of the issues of the
firm.

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Contents
1. Introduction..................................................................................................................................3
Discussion........................................................................................................................................3
Summary of Two Firms from MBA presentations......................................................................3
2. Key Findings about McDonald’s Presentation........................................................................3
3. Analysis.......................................................................................................................................5
Recommendations............................................................................................................................6
Reference List..................................................................................................................................7

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1. Introduction
A global organization based in Australia is facing issues related to multicultural tensions
in workplace with adverse consequences like high turnover, low morale among employees and
low productivity. The firm has global partners from different countries across the globe which
means employees need to coordinate on several projects with teams in countries like Mexico,
China, India and the United States. The management team of the firm is willing to adopt new
policies and practices to address the present multicultural issues of the firm. Changes are
required in the long term strategies of the firm that would foster collaboration among
multicultural teams. Team members of the firm are from different cultural background, are in
different time zone and speak different languages which make it difficult for the firm to manage
its culturally diverse workforce. Surface level diversity is the observable differences between
individuals in a workgroup due to difference in ethnicity, age, race, gender, sexual orientation
whereas deep level diversity includes values, psychological beliefs and attitude (Ang and Van
Dyne 2015). The Australian firm has to face issues related to both surface level and deep level
diversity. The issues faced by the organization in Diversity Fatigue are not addressed, like the
organization has not responded to women and minorities advancing into leadership. Leadership
style adopted by the firm is authoritarian with strict control points that result in multicultural
tensions.

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Discussion
Summary of Two Firms from MBA presentations
2. Key Findings about McDonald’s Presentation
The work culture of McDonald fosters both surface level and deep level diversity .Mc
Donald’s is world’s renowned food service and retail sector and serves 69 million customers
daily in approximately 36,900 outlets in 100 countries as of 2016.
How McDonald’s embraces and values Cultural Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence and
Diversity
Cultural Intelligence
Cultural intelligence is the ability to work effectively across cultures (Scott-Halsell et al.
2013). McDonald’s has a strong culture at workplace that enables the organization to stay
focused, define goals and deliver. McDonald’s promote communication and diversity. The
cultural promise of McDonald’s is reflected in the communication strategy of the brand with the
audience and in recruitment, retention and development of its employees. Mc Donald’s embraces
the changing needs of employees, customers and marketplace. Cultural promise is rooted in the
business model of McDonalds.
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence and Organizational Engagement are key contributors towards the
performance of individual as well as organizational performance (Côté 2014).

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Human Resource Management
The Key Ingredients for success of Mc Donald’s are as follows
Mc Donald’s integrate emotional intelligence into the culture of leadership and focuses
on practical and real world training. The key goals identified my leaders of McDonald’s are to be
a learning organization, to support the development of employees and to blend the employee and
customer experience.
Soft skill can be linked with the Emotional Intelligence of a person (Murphy 2014). Soft
skills define leadership and creativity. Soft skills can be of six major types which are
communication skills, problem solving skills and the decision making skills, self-management
skills, professional skills, leadership skills and teamwork skills (Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee
2013). Mc Donald’s can reduce loss of the production and progress by implementation of these
soft skills. But great experiences can’t be delivered only by soft skills. McDonald’s can leverage
the soft skills of employees with the use of “people profit chain”, increase of “emotional
engagement” and with the principle of “fusion”.
Diversity Management
McDonald’s has spent billions of dollars in Diversity Management programs which is
available for all staffs. In the organization, equal opportunities are provided to people from
diverse backgrounds and communities. McDonald’s has adopted diversity as a strategy and has
created a strategy for measuring accountability and managing a diverse workforce which has
phenomenal effect on its operating income and business growth. The organization addresses
diversity the same way it addresses challenges and opportunities. Diversity programs in

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McDonalds are not cost centers but they are profitable investments that drive innovation. These
programs promote inclusion and decrease the fatigue factor.
Diversity is perceived as a challenge in McDonald’s. Awareness about diversity is
created among workforce and the diversity training in McDonald’s addresses relevant issues at
workplace, builds skills of employees and focuses on practical training of the employees to
improve their performance.
Incivility and McDonald’s
Incivility is an inappropriate behavior that exists in workplace, for instance, negative
behavior like complaining and gossiping, Physical Assault like inappropriate touching and
harassing and Discrimination like yelling and threats (Huff 2013).Customer based business
organizations like McDonalds must focus on Choice of staff, ongoing training, and minimum
standards, code of conduct and constant revision of policies and standards for excellent customer
service. In McDonalds, customer service often doesn’t meet standards. In McDonald’s staffs are
young in age and inexperienced and do not how to handle intense situation in the domain of
customer service. Thus the organization should monitor the behavior and actions of employees
and should obtain feedback from customers.
Asiana Airlines
In San Francisco in USA, the Asiana airline crashed in July 2013. Pilot mismanagement
and confusion caused the crash of Flight 214 of Asiana airlines. Passengers of Asiana airlines
suffered due to the communication failure in the accident of 2013. After t five months of crash of
Flight 214, Soo Cheon Kim was introduced as the CEO of Asiana airlines. High level of
diversity adversely affects firms like the Asiana airlines, for instance, increased cases of human

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error resulting in crashes and larger planes are adverse consequences of high level of diversity in
the airline. Cultural intelligence and diversity was not incorporated in the culture of Asiana
airlines which caused the crash of Flight 214 of Asiana Airlines in 2013. Crew Resource
Management CRM) is vital for an organization like Asiana Airlines to reduce devastating effects
of human error. Team spirit needs to be the core of the CRM training program. Lack of
adequate Crew Resource Management knowledge among personnel is one of the reasons that
should lead to enhancement of cultural intelligence in a firm like Asiana Airlines Crew Resource
Management. There was lack of proper Leadership in Asiana Airlines which lead to the failure
of implementation and cultural embracement of CRM which lead to the 2013 crash. For
successful CRM program, team-building culture must be both implemented and embraced
(Rouhani 2013). The CRM related program which was not supported by the management of
Asiana airlines is the training program. According to the Asian culture, supervisors make
decisions and defer those to people. Pilots of Asiana Airlines were accustomed to military order
which means strict discipline and control. Authoritarian leadership must be decreased in the
management structure of Asiana airlines.
3. Analysis
The Australian firm finds it difficult to manage teams spread across different countries.
Team members have to work in a virtual environment and have to rely on videoconferencing,
email and intranets as the medium of communications. The team members of the Australian firm
are from different cultural background and ethnicity. The firm has to handle issues like the
difference in time zone and lack of effective communication while managing the virtual teams.
The team goals and objectives can’t be effectively communicated in a virtual team. The
performance standards are often not clearly communicated among team members dispersed in

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various countries. Team members of the Australian firm stay in different countries and hardly get
a chance to meet each other physically. These results in communication gap, misunderstandings
and confusion and remote team members often feel isolated. The Australian firm faces issues to
create cohesion and collaboration among team members which is essential for the high
performance of a team because face-to-face team meetings are not possible. Monitoring, control
and performance management are areas where the Australian form requires improvement. The
team members belong to different countries and thus their values and work culture is different.
For instance, the Americans are individualistic in nature and prefer to communicate directly
while in Asian countries group cohesion and subtle communication is preferred. This results in
difficulty in conflict management across geographically dispersed teams (Schutte, Malouff and
Thorsteinsson 2013).
To manage a diverse workforce across multicultural regions, cultural intelligence must be
fostered among employees. Cultures can be of three different types- corporate culture, personal
culture and national culture (Crowne 2013).The Australian firm has to manage these three
cultures. Cultural intelligence gives positive direction for an organization and its workforce.
Thus to manage teams from multicultural background, the Australian firm must focus on a clear
communication strategy and must deliver cultural promise like that of McDonald’s. Biases and
discrimination should be avoided in the Australian firm and equal opportunities should be given
to team members. These are practices that are adopted by global firm McDonald’s and adoption
of these practices can resolve the issues of the Australian firm. Emotional intelligence is the
ability to discern and understand emotions. Unity is the common effect of Emotional intelligence
and cultural intelligence. To manage the multicultural teams of the Australian firm, employees
should be trained to be culturally and emotionally intelligent. The Australian firm should invest

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in diversity management programs like the global firm McDonald’s. The diversity management
program must focus in cultural training among the team members of the geographically
dispersed team. The diversity management program, emotional and cultural intelligence must be
integrated in the entire business process of the Australian firm which include people, process
and technology which is similar to the global firm Mc Donald’s approach of managing a
diverse workforce. The Asiana airline’s management structure lacked proper leadership and
communication gap resulted in flight crash. Thus to reduce the communication gap among the
multicultural team members, they should be trained to handle incivility and should act in an
emotionally intelligent manner. The integration of emotional and cultural intelligence and
diversity management programs of the Australian firm must focus on goals, building trust,
mastering conflict, achieving commitment and embracing accountability among the
geographically disperse team. Diversity management program will enable the team members of
the Australian firm to build trust. Lack of trust among team members are the cause of problems
like high turnover, low employee morale and low productivity. Also, leadership style is of
paramount importance in determining the success of an organization (Goleman, Boyatzis and
McKee 2013).It is clearly reflected from the case of Asian airlines. Thus, the Australian firm
must incorporate transformational leadership style instead of authoritarian leadership style
(Fullan 2014). The leaders of the organization must support the team members and an open
communication model must be adopted. The performance standards and the methods of
performance management must be clearly communicated among team members (Keung and
Rockinson-Szapkiw 2013).

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Recommendations
It can be recommended that the Australian firm must embrace and implement Cultural
Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence and Diversity management program in its business process
in order to handle multicultural teams. Team members should get a chance to meet each other
face-to-face and thus the Australian firm must promote physical transfer in a different country
instead of working in virtual groups. Diversity management program will definitely not be a
cost-center for the Australian firm; rather it will be an intelligent investment. The Australian firm
must implement a clear communication strategy to build trust among team members. Leaders of
the firm must adopt transformational leadership style and avoid biases and discrimination.

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Reference List
Ang, S. and Van Dyne, L., 2015. Handbook of cultural intelligence. Routledge.
Côté, S., 2014. Emotional intelligence in organizations. Annu. Rev. Organ. Psychol. Organ.
Behav., 1(1), pp.459-488.
Crowne, K.A., 2013. Cultural exposure, emotional intelligence, and cultural intelligence: An
exploratory study. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, 13(1), pp.5-22.
Fullan, M., 2014. Leading in a culture of change personal action guide and workbook. John
Wiley & Sons.
Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R.E. and McKee, A., 2013. Primal leadership: Unleashing the power of
emotional intelligence. Harvard Business Press.
Huff, K.C., 2013. Language, cultural intelligence and expatriate success. Management Research
Review, 36(6), pp.596-612.
K. Keung, E. and J. Rockinson-Szapkiw, A., 2013. The relationship between transformational
leadership and cultural intelligence: A study of international school leaders. Journal of
Educational Administration, 51(6), pp.836-854.
Murphy, K.R., 2014. A critique of emotional intelligence: what are the problems and how can
they be fixed?. Psychology Press.
Rouhani, A., 2013. An investigation into emotional intelligence, foreign language anxiety and
empathy through a cognitive-affective course in an EFL context. Linguistik online, 34(2).

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Schutte, N.S., Malouff, J.M. and Thorsteinsson, E.B., 2013. Increasing emotional intelligence
through training: Current status and future directions. International Journal of Emotional
Education, 5(1), p.56.
Scott-Halsell, S.A., Saiprasert, W. and Yang, J., 2013. Emotional intelligence differences: Could
culture be the culprit?. Journal of Teaching in Travel & Tourism, 13(4), pp.339-353.