Essay about Geert Hofstede and Homogeneous Team

Submitted By GaryKk1
Words: 3468
Pages: 14

Report Assessment
Topic: ‘‘write a report comparing the benefits and difficulties between using of a homogenous team of employees from one country and heterogeneous team made up of people from different countries for the purposes of managing a project in a multinational company. Provide recommendations for how the difficulties can be overcome and for how team members’ contributions may be recognized and rewarded. Support your analysis and recommendations with reference to management literature, real life examples, and other relevant and reliable sources’’.

Executive Summary
The report provides an analysis of homogeneous team which made up people who were from one country and heterogeneous team which made up by people who were from different countries, both its benefits difficulties according to the stages of team development and comparison two settings of homogeneous team’s benefits versus heterogeneous team’s difficulties and heterogeneous team’s benefits versus homogeneous team’s difficulties by following the process of stage of team development. According to Johnson at al. (2002), the stages of team development were forming, storming, norming, and performing stages as process to an effective and efficient team to the purpose of successful accomplishment of projects. Meanwhile, Geert Hofstede’s culture dimensions supplied to explain both homogeneous team and heterogeneous team in term of culture variable factor, which affect overall achievement.

Comparison between both homogeneous team and heterogeneous team, showed cross-culture project payoff by heterogeneous team with higher conflict and low satisfaction interpersonally and homogeneous team is better for achieve interpersonal satisfaction in a simple project within a short period of time. The report also recommended to overcame both homogeneous team and heterogeneous team difficulties and establish appropriate recognition and reward system before teamwork. However, the report lack of evidence of statistic data to sufficient support analysis and recommendations.

Table of Content 1. Executive Summary 2

2. Introduction 5

3. The stage of team development explanation 7

4. Benefits and Difficulties 8 4.1. Homogeneous Team benefits 8 4.2. Homogeneous Team difficulties 10 4.3. Heterogeneous Team benefits 12 4.4. Heterogeneous Team difficulties 14

5. Team Comparison 16 5.1. Homogeneous team is better than heterogeneous team 16 5.2. Heterogeneous team is better than homogeneous team 18

6. Recommendation 20

7. Conclusion 22

8. References 24

Introduction
Team is composed by minority groups of people or each personnel, who have complementary skills and apply the same method and share mutual responsibility to achieve the same purpose of project and planned company performance target (Mello and Ruckes, 2006). The ultimate team goal is to achieve high collaboration efficiency and effective coordination to target, but not all of the team can achieve this high performance goal (Amason, Shrader and Tompson, 2006). As raised diversity of company projects and performance targets in multinationals, the composition of multinational company’s team changed from a simple minority group people refer as homogeneous team (Quinn, 2001), who come from one national background to a mixed minority groups of personnel which named heterogeneous team (Pitcher, 2001), who come from different national backgrounds with cultural differentiation and complexity.

In this case, homogeneous team made up of people from the same race, social history and age group with the same culture dimensions in term of power distance, individualism versus collectivism, masculinity versus femininity, uncertainty avoidance and long-term versus short-term orientation (Hofstede, 2011), whereas heterogeneous team made up of mixture people of different race, social history and age with totally different culture dimensions. These culture dimensions were stated by