Team building for teams that have diverse professional backgrounds

This topic actually could be rephrased as the cross-functional team building and the method for optimizing the team performance. Actually, the cross-functional cooperation have already becomes the trending for new Chinese business model. For better explanations, it should be the new model taking advantage of various resources among different fields. As the driving service for example, in China, the new driving service APP called “aidaijia” on mobile phones explore the potential market. People who have drunken and need driving service could use the APP finding the nearest driver through GPS locating. The model is similar to the taxi requiring APP - Uber. This driving service application is created by the innovation team comprised by employees with diverse professional backgrounds. Also, the interesting fact is that the backbones of this team are millennial. Computer science, telecommunication, recruitment and training, marketing people cooperate to form an excellent team. This merging operation becomes a trend and happens frequently in those success samples in nowadays market exploration.
Diversity comes with a paradox situation; it creates inspiration and could perform better, conversely, it also increases the chance of potential conflicts. (Garcia-Prieto et al., 2003) The conflicts could incur through miscommunication or lack of interaction. According to research, this relate to “level factors” difference of the team, which could be explained as how deep that the team member communicate through verbal and non-verbal way. (Harrison et al., 1998; Milliken and Martins, 1996) When the group requiring to interact consistently, the team of surface level differences shown to carry less significance for groups than deep level differences. (Harrison et al., 1998) The “deep level” could be the optimal status for good team, which is understandable because the deep level differences might be the potential chance on creating new thoughts, the marginal knowledge communication have already create huge amount of new patents. For example, the telecommunication technology and material technology have some knowledge exchange, the new antenna use the sea water stream to be the receiver and could be the backup for normal dipole antenna. If differences happen, the similarity should exist too, when deep-level similarity higher, team learning was also higher. (van Emmerik et al., 2011) If compare to the academic education, it would make sense. When identifying the peers or seniors with same path on study, the knowledge absorbing can be more acceptable and efficient. We may ask the former students about their experience on job searching or study because we almost have the similar path. I think it can also explain the reason that personal networks is easier to established with people from same region or same schools. However, to deal with no matter the deep level differences or similarity, time consuming would be unavoidable. The ultimate aim is building the team which members know better to each other and better build the friendship, this requires time and energy.
Lots of weak group interact have high relation to the prejudice. When enter an organization, individuals will creates a social identity based on self-perception. (Tajfel, 1978) Based on different education background, country and experience, the miscomprehension would be incurred easily, and that would sabotage the team building. For mitigating prejudice, Turner et al. (2008) identified four variables that foundationally creating positive relationships between in group and out groups. First is reduced intergroup anxiety, second is positive in group norms, third is positive out group norms and the final one is inclusion of the out group as part of self-categorization. That would be the common variables for normal teams, which may have some specific difficulty for team members with diversity professional backgrounds. The