Culture Standards and Their Impact On Teamwork - an Empirical Analysis of Austrian, German, Hungarian and Spanish Culture Differences

Zusammenfassung

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This article examines the impact of different cultural standards on the processes and performances of Austrian, Spanish, German and Hungarian task groups. We therefore analyzed 201 qualitative interviews with Austrians, Spaniards, Germans and Hungarians, which were conducted from 1996 to 2001. This paper uses the cultural standard framework as its theoretical background as well as the concepts of team development. The emphasis on our research is on those culture standards that have been identified as relevant for the cooperation within teams. Critical Incidents that can be explained by the above-mentioned culture standards have been categorized referring to the "Five-Phase-Model" of team development by Tuckman and Jensen.

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Auszug

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Culture Standards and Their Impact On Teamwork - an Empirical Analysis of Austrian, German, Hungarian and Spanish Culture Differences

1. Introduction and Aims

Developments affecting the environment of organisations like globalisation, a reduced significance of national borders or technological change do not only lead to new organisational forms like large conglomerates doing business on a truly global basis, virtual organisations or organisational networks, but also lead to considerable changes inside organisations. The flattening of hierarchies as well as the increasingly project-oriented forms of organisations and work processes are only a few of the consequences organisations nowadays have to deal with. On the level of every day work we can observe a considerable increase in the use of teams and team work. In view of the above-mentioned increasingly dynamic and global environments, today's organizational groups are more often culturally diverse than ever before. There is a considerable body of literature addressing the problems linked to group work, its higher or not so high efficiency or group dynamic processes, etc. (Bettenhausen 1991, Hill 1982, Shaw 1983). Several studies already examine the impact of diversity within groups (Watson/Kumar et al 1993, Davison 1996, Watson 1998). But we still know rather little about the effects of special cultural traits on the process and performance of task-related group work.

In their study on work team members Kirkman/Shapiro (2001a, 2001b) considered four cultural values such as individualism-collectivism, power distance (Hofstede 1980), doing orientation and determinism (Maznevski et al. 1997) and their influence on teamwork. The authors suggest that considering only four cultural values in research leads to very limited results. Therefore the identification of further cultural values represents an important aim in future research.

In order to advance the already existing approaches we outline in our exemplary study a further approach that aims at identifying cultural potentials for conflicts in the context of teamwork on the basis of culture standards research.

Therefore we try to answer the following research questions:

* What kind of typical behavior or typical observed behavior of members from one ...

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