Management Principles - Assignment

Running head: MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES
Management principles
Name of the student
Name of the university
Author note

1MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES
Introduction
One of the major concepts being followed in the contemporary business organizations is
teamwork. This concept refers to the creation of team with a group of employees with having
same expertise and same objectives. This helps the organizations to have more communication
and coordination among the employees along with having more probability of generating
innovative ideas. On the other hand, in the current era of globalization, majority of the global
firms are having diversified set of employees belonging from different social and cultural areas.
This is also leading to have teams in the organization with having diverse team members in
place. However, there are number of advantages and disadvantages being faced by the
contemporary business organizations from having diverse teams in place.
In view to this issue, there are number of different opinions being given by different
authors. This essay will use different scholarly articles in order to justify the statement that
diversity is a barrier to effective teamwork. The opinions of the authors will be critically
analyzed in order to identify both the negative and positive aspects of them.
Language barrier
One of the challenges or barriers that can get emerged from the diversity in the team is
language issue. This is due to the reason that in any organizational teams, the major objective is
to collectively achieve the set goals. Thus, it is responsibility of the team leaders or team
managers to effectively communicate with their team members. However, in the case of the
diversity in the teams, employees or the team members will be comfortable in different
languages. This is mainly due to the reason that different social and cultural groups are having
different language for communication. According to Tenzer, Pudelko and Harzing (2014),

2MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES
having different employees from different social and cultural backgrounds will affect the
communication process in the team. The authors have also stated that if the leader and his
subordinates are from different social backgrounds, then their language will be also different.
Thus, the leader cannot communicate his vision to his subordinates while the team members
while the team members will not be able to communicate their issues and grievances to their
managers.
Thus, according to the authors, diversity in the workplace will prove challenging for the
managers as well as for the employees to effectively communicate with each other. However, the
basic objective of the team concept is to enhance the level of communication among the team
members and it cannot get achieved with having diverse team in place. Moreover, the authors
have also discussed that language barriers may also create threat of miscommunication among
the team members. This is due to the reason that difference in language may lead to have
different meanings for the members. For instance, the different language used by the team
managers may create some unwanted meaning for their team members.
Difference in opinions
Another major barrier for effective teamwork in terms of the diversity of the employees is
the difference in opinions. This is due to the reason that the more will be the diversity of the
employees, the more will be the employees from different social and cultural backgrounds.
According to Ewoh (2013), one of the major threats of diversity for the effective teamwork is
difference in opinions among the employees. This is due to the reason that employees from
different social and cultural backgrounds will have different set of approaches for a certain issue.
Different team members from a particular team will come up with different approaches.