‘Intercultural Communication Challenges and Impact on Multicultural Teams in Saudi Arabian Companies – Perceptions and Roles on Beliefs of Trust’
type: CreativeWork
description: Trust is very important in multinational organisations as it serves to improve teamwork, creates a positive and creative environment, and helps develop cooperation and enhance communication amongst members of the multicultural organisations and ameliorate their performance at work. However, despite the importance of trust in building collaborative and effective relationships in the workplace, the increasing cultural diversity in these organisations often makes perception of trust face many intercultural communication challenges, which can disrupt the organisational performance and competitiveness. These rise to conflicts among them and even lead to severance of relations. The aim of this research is to explore how team members in multicultural teams at multinational companies in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia understand trust. This research adopts an innovative approach by using a mixed method framework in which three data collection tools were used: questionnaire, interviews, and metaphor analysis. This method has not been utilised before in the literature to study the conceptualisation of trust. 482 members of multicultural teams working in four international companies have participated in the questionnaire as well as 38 members participating in the interview in this study. Thematic analysis, descriptive statistics and regression analysis is used to analyse qualitative and quantitative data, respectively. Significant findings of this study show that ten key individual personality characteristics contribute to perceptions of trust among multicultural team, which are honesty, reciprocation, reliability, credibility, ability, security, openness, dependability, loyalty and shared understand. However, three characteristics of the trustee were considered highly valued and critical for the establishment of the trust between the trustor and the trustee, which are ability, honesty and reciprocity. The social and cultural factors were found to contribute to the development of …
abstract: Trust is very important in multinational organisations as it serves to improve teamwork, creates a positive and creative environment, and helps develop cooperation and enhance communication amongst members of the multicultural organisations and ameliorate their performance at work. However, despite the importance of trust in building collaborative and effective relationships in the workplace, the increasing cultural diversity in these organisations often makes perception of trust face many intercultural communication challenges, which can disrupt the organisational performance and competitiveness. These rise to conflicts among them and even lead to severance of relations. The aim of this research is to explore how team members in multicultural teams at multinational companies in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia understand trust. This research adopts an innovative approach by using a mixed method framework in which three data collection tools were used: questionnaire, interviews, and metaphor analysis. This method has not been utilised before in the literature to study the conceptualisation of trust. 482 members of multicultural teams working in four international companies have participated in the questionnaire as well as 38 members participating in the interview in this study. Thematic analysis, descriptive statistics and regression analysis is used to analyse qualitative and quantitative data, respectively. Significant findings of this study show that ten key individual personality characteristics contribute to perceptions of trust among multicultural team, which are honesty, reciprocation, reliability, credibility, ability, security, openness, dependability, loyalty and shared understand. However, three characteristics of the trustee were considered highly valued and critical for the establishment of the trust between the trustor and the trustee, which are ability, honesty and reciprocity. The social and cultural factors were found to contribute to the development of …
author: Altwaian, Haila
license: https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/bitstreams/bdac1398-da12-478e-a535-154489e4fc49/download
date published: 2017
date modified: 2026-07-24T06:18:40Z
provider: De Montfort University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: De Montfort University