Boost the Performance of Your Global Team

Highlights by Ines Meneses from Dianne Saphiere's Master thesis

Business demands the effective functioning of geographically dispersed, culturally mixed work teams.

What do highly productive global teams do that is different from the less productive ones? Researcher and businesswoman Dianne Saphiere invested years of her life and her master thesis in answering this question. And by paying attention to her findings we can answer another question:

How do we make our global teams more effective?

Saphiere found out that members of highly productive multicultural teams, when compared to less productive ones:

• Communicate more often in informal, social ways
• Utilize more task and affect behaviors
• Frequently disagree with one another, critically analyzing issues in meetings and focusing on task in a positive manner in writing
• Act as cultural interpreters and mediators
• Unanimously desire to work together again

I invite you to bring up the above behaviors with your global team, and discuss how to implement them.

Here are some more highlights for your reading pleasure…

Participants of highly productive teams:

• average 3.7 times more conversations among team members than did less productive teams, including more informal conversation, telephone discussions and in-person meetings.
• demonstrate a keener interest in other team members, a thirst for knowledge and information, and a recognition that situations were constantly changing, requiring flexibility of behavior and a high commitment to task accomplishment.
• rely on the written word for accuracy, and on telephone conversations in particular to gauge emotional commitment and feeling.
• are honest with one another about their feelings of discomfort or concern, even over distance.

There were examples of a participant gaining information invaluable to the success of a project when talking to a friend or acquaintance informally about a completely separate subject.

Productive teams spend more time on emotion and relationship during face-to-face meetings. Results would seem to encourage teams to spend social and relationship time when face-to-face (though not to the exclusion of task) and to focus on accomplishing the task when operating from disparate locations.

In correspondence, depersonalized/negative comments showed a statistical correlation with productivity. In meetings, on the other hand, personalized disagreement, both positive and negative, correlated statistically with productivity. These findings would seem to support the value of openly expressing difference in both written and face-to-face media.

In meetings, less productive teams tended to make more positive comments about the issue being discussed, while highly productive teams played devil’s advocate. Productive teams used depersonalized/negative comments nearly 50% more often than did the less productive teams. This seems to reflect a strong and a critical task focus for the more productive teams.

You can see the complete results of this study by ordering a reprint from Dianne Hofner Saphiere [dianne@nipporica.com].