Global Teams

As indicated in the quotations above, this chapter discusses what has so far been a success story. We explore a case of geographically dispersed teams with a view to furthering our understanding of the factors that have enabled a successful start. While extant literature tends to focus on cultural differences as obstacles to be overcome in order to increase performance, practitioners look for means to achieve potential synergies (Stahl et al ., 2010). We look at a case of teams providing financial services to the multinational company (MNC) Techbi1 (see also Chapter 9) on a global scale. The teams are permanent and consist of local employees at an off-shore centre in India and their managers, some of which work at the headquarters in Denmark and some of which work at the centre in Bangalore. Thus, the teams span across culturally distant countries and the organizational units of headquarters and a subsidiary. According to the traditional view in research literature, such circumstances are likely to lay difficult odds for the teams (e.g., Martins et al., 2003; Watson & Kumar, 1992). But in the present case, the teams in the shared services centre have been considered successful by Techbi during the centre’s five years of operation – to the extent that the MNC plans to expand the centre considerably over the next three years. Moreover, team members at the centre and managers at headquarters provide similar and predominantly positive descriptions of the teams’ functioning, strategies and results.