Managing Multicultural Teams: Why We Need Intercultural Competences

We aim to explore the importance of developing intercultural competences for culturally diverse teams, with a particular focus on the role of managers can play in making the team members work effectively together. This paper is part of a future larger project to analyse and understand the importance of intercultural competences when managing multicultural teams. Our search strategies included screening of relevant literature, articles, research and business journals, books, bibliographies, internet searches, meta-analyses that constituted the theoretical part of this study. Our purpose was to clarify why multinational teams have become a "norm" in organisations, to clarify the concept of "multinational teams" – by defining them and highlighting their characteristics - for a better understanding of the intercultural competences required and for exploring methods to improve multicultural team management style. We recommended solutions to overcome challenges that might occur within multinational teams: developing intercultural competence as an additional management competence, top-down support within multinationals to encourage people embrace cultural diversity, intercultural trainings and workshops to increase cultural awareness and to develop intercultural competences. To sum up, successful teams and successful managers in multicultural environments are expected to develop themselves permanently, to possess intercultural competency and to identify, understand and manage cultural differences effectively. Our study brings into light that intercultural competence should be treated and trained as a distinct management competence while embracing cultural differences and developing a learning attitude are vital for effective cooperation within multinational teams.