Developing Effective Teams in Global Multidiscipline Engineering and Manufacturing Organizations

Abstract

In today’s competitive business environment most activities in global relationships (subsidiaries, outsourcing, joint ventures) are carried out by multi-cultural and multidisciplinary teams which may be collocated or distributed. The members of these teams comprise a variety of experts of diverse cultural, organizational, and professional backgrounds. Within the project lifetime they are connected together with time and money constraints for a specific period of time to accomplish certain distinct objectives. The aims of this paper are to report on findings from an extensive literature review regarding multi-cultural and multidiscipline team work and to provide a basis for discussion and analysis of challenges such teams experience. A case study is carried out in a global multidiscipline engineering organization to identify empirical evidence of potential challenges in projects carried out by multicultural and multidisciplinary collaborative teamwork.