Multi-cultural Teams & Their Leadership Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Multi-cultural Teams & Their Leadership - Essay Example This paper aims to highlight the major issues that may hinder the success of such a team. Communication barriers are the first issue which may hinder the success of a multi-cultural team. The Swiss culture is said to have a bilingual culture where French, German, Romansh and Italian are said to be the official languages. However, the point of debate is the expertise of people in speaking and understanding all these languages. The Swiss culture, hence, lacks communication ease and conformity with all people in an organization or a group. Moreover, there are certain words like â€Å"achievement, commitment, common sense †¦management and skill† which lack corresponding vocabulary in German language. Thus, there is also a possibility of miscommunication and misunderstanding due to the language differences in a culturally diverse team. To overcome this barrier, the leaders and organizations may approach a language learning and training program for the workers. Moreover, the us e of soft facial expressions, appropriate tone of voice and continuous reminders of the important tasks may help in reducing the risks associated with the language and communication barrier (Adler 1997). Another problem which the multicultural group of workers can face is on reaching a common consensus. These people belong to different backgrounds and may have different perspectives on different issues. Thus everyone has his own views and they find it difficult to reach a conclusion on deciding upon certain things. These workers tend to be from a diverse background and disagree on many issues. Multicultural teams have to be managed properly so that they do not face difficulties when reaching this common consensus. These multicultural teams might be facing the problem of miscommunication and the manager should look after this. It is necessary that the manager helps the team to reach a common consensus by providing each and every worker with the necessary information about the other. The perspectives of the diverse workers are laid together so that every worker can understand it and follow the action plan. Members of a culturally diverse workforce tend to lack trust in each other than the members of a homogenous workforce. The reason for this is the diversity in the workforce that comes along with the people of different culture. The team in the superstore is related to all American, Swiss, Italian and German culture and the problem can start when one group of workers consider the other inferior. Lack of trust can occur when the Americans consider the people from other cultures to be inferior to them in terms of education and lifestyle. Similarly the people belonging to the Swiss culture would be more acquainted with the policies of the stores and hence might consider the other people inferior. It is here that the role of the manager comes into play to help them collaborate with each other. Trust can be reinforced if the managers provide the workers time to know each other. The workers should be made to work with each other so that they can get a grasp of each other’s culture. Halverson and Tirmizi (2008) put forward that trust is a major factor which helps the team members to define the role of each other. Hence it can be concluded that trust is a major factor which can help the multicultural workers to get together. Jealousy is also one of the problems that the workers in a multicultural force

Unix Vs. Windows Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Unix Vs. Windows - Essay Example operating system to be used by complete novices (as a result of the ease of operation and the simple user interfaces), Microsoft has also forged partnerships with many big and small PC manufacturers, thereby ensuring that the operating system is shipped along with the PCs that consumers purchase (Jeurguen Haas, 2005). However, UNIX (as also its various versions) continues to be the preferred choice of programmers and software developers in the case of network programming. This is due to the fact that UNIX offers ready-to-use libraries that facilitate the use of direct networking features such as sockets, semaphores and pipes. In windows however, the user is encapsulated from all such features, thereby denying them flexibility at the core programming level. This, according to them, is due to the fact that the operating system offers additional advanced capabilities when compared to Windows (Jeurguen Haas, 2005). One of the most versatile features of UNIX is the fact that the operating system can be installed on numerous machines consisting of different architectures (be it cluster or distributed architectures). Moreover, unlike window, which is a PC based OS; UNIX can be installed on supercomputers and mainframes with a minimal change of configuration alone (KernelThread, 2006). Another problem that continues to plague windows is the constant occurrence of system breakdowns and frequent hang-ups, while such a problem has been found to have lesser frequency of occurrence in the case of UNIX. As such, a UNIX machine requires less network administration and maintenance. UNIX also offers a greater processing power and is found to have solutions for distributed environments as well. The above points do not mean that windows do not provide networking solutions. The upper advantage of UNIX over windows based solutions lies in the fact that in order to operate across a network using windows, one would have to usually install additional software in order to communicate