Leading multicultural teams: are cultural differences barriers or drivers to a team’s success?: portuguese managers’ perspective

• Autor(a) principal: Bento, Afonso Nascimento
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/23113
• topic: Cultura -- Culture; Cultura portuguesa -- Portuguese culture; Leadership; Team leadership; Multicultural teams; Liderança; Liderança de equipas; Equipas multiculturais

This thesis’ purpose is to understand if cultural differences are barriers or drivers to a team’s success. To do so, this research focuses on the main cultural characteristics of the Portuguese culture that impact a team’s success, on understanding if cultural differences are barriers or drivers to the success of a team, on gathering effective strategies for Portuguese leaders to apply to their leadership in order to successfully manage cultural diversity in their teams, and on the required skills to become a successful multicultural leader. This research was conducted by semi-structured interviews of 10 Portuguese managers with several years of experience in managing multicultural teams. The main findings include the characterization of the Portuguese as medium-context communicators, indirect negative feedback providers, hierarchical leaders, top-down decision makers, neither relationship- based nor task-based trust builders, confrontation avoiders, flexible time managers and applications- first persuaders. In addition to this, research results also suggest that cultural differences are drivers to a team’s success. Furthermore, the best strategies to successfully lead a multicultural team are to listen to team members and to understand oneself and the context the leaders are inserted in. And finally, the research shows that the most important skill a multicultural leader must possess is cultural empathy. While the findings corroborate some of the literature, they also contribute to it by challenging several predefined ideas and setting the basis for future researchers to expand on this field of study.