Multicultural Team Effectiveness: Emotional Intelligence as Success Factor

As a result of the increasing globalization more and more organizations are operating internationally. Such multinational companies often rely on successful teamwork to reach goals and to compete on the fast-paced global market. Indeed, teamwork plays an important role and can lead to faster results. Teams, whose members come from different nations and backgrounds place special demands on operations, diversity clearly adds complexity and a longer learning curve for establishing effective processes. In the multicultural team, the role of emotions has gained increasing interest in the last years; practitioners report that where people work together, emotions are not far to seek. An awareness of emotions seems to be especially important as cultural differences in emotion processing and diversity among members may cause negative emotion and lead to conflict and misunderstandings what may have serious consequences reducing performance. The aim of this book is to identify challenges for multinational teams focusing on emotions within the team, and to propose emotional intelligence as an approach to multicultural team effectiveness.