Effective global teams : impact of organizational culture change and national culture differences

The concept of dispersed teams is widely applied in industry today. This thesis explores the experience of one remotely located team of a U.S. based multinational in the automotive industry based in Japan. It begins by reviewing the literature on the subject, followed by a general discussion of the concept of organizational culture change and the impact of national culture differences in working globally dispersed. The automotive team that is the basis for this study is successful in the marketplace but sometimes faces conflicts working with the Headquarter and other business units in its efforts to meet the specific requirements of the Japanese market. The differences in priorities and business practices often serve to cause the members in the Japan based remote team to feel isolated and misunderstood in their role as the "front-line" soldiers" with a defined mission of growing the Japanese market. What emerges from the study is the fact that a major culture change in the home organization coupled with diverse cultural differences between Japan and the U.S. makes it difficult for the entire organization to move in sync with the shared visions of the senior management as quickly as necessary in the fast changing marketplace. Although the directions are clear and the future path seem rational, entrenched ways of doing business caused by old habits and existing systems seem to get in the way. There also appears to be no fast and clear-cut solutions to this dilemma. It takes more time to build trust, develop a shared vision and mitigate the cultural gulfs that are inevitable. For management, it means greater efforts to communicate about where the organization needs to move and resolving differences in perceptions between the remote team and the home organizations.

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2000

Author dc:creator

• Lee, John, 1957 Dec. 10-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Janice A. Klein.

• Sloan School of Management.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/9200

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/9200