Communication barriers in a multicultural team's recruitment decision-making process

Communication Problem and Analysis

In contemporary business management, communication problems lie at the root of many problems within business organizations. That is equally true within Human Resource Management (HRM) functions (Shadovitz, 2011). Two of the most common types of problems that typically arise within business units or departments have to do with culturally-based differences (Charvatova & van der Veer, 2006) and the degree to which the individuals within the team feel safe expressing concerns or disagreements, especially when those concerns represent potential conflicts with team leaders or with anybody perceived as being in a position of relative authority (Shadovitz, 2011). Our team experienced precisely this type of problem.

Background of the Case Study

Our team comprised eight individuals representing several different cultural, ethnic, and national backgrounds. Two American-born males asserted their de-facto leadership during our very first organizational meeting. They suggested a team vote for the position of Team Leader and one of them was elected by a unanimous informal vote. Immediately thereafter, the official leader and his unofficial co-leader began making most of the decisions for the team, based more on the strength of personality and dominant demeanor. The more they spoke, the less that some other team members contributed to the discussions; and the rest of the team seemed to just follow along in whatever direction the team leader and his colleague led the team.

This interpersonal dynamic led to a significant mistake in judgment that could have been avoided if the other team members had been able to assert themselves more effectively during group meetings. One source of this problem was the fact that some of the team members were from cultural backgrounds that emphasize male domination, especially in business. However, in many respects, that issue only arose because the two team leaders (the official leader and his unofficial co-leader) established an organizational culture in which speaking up to call attention to their mistakes or to disagree with them was strongly discouraged.

As a result, the climate that evolved was one in which the two team leaders, in effect, made almost all of the decisions for the team. If someone disagreed with their analyses or strategies, the two leaders typically overcame those objections by making it clear in various ways that they did not appreciate the input and that life within the team would be more difficult for anybody who disagreed with them or who tried to call attention to their mistakes or oversights.

One of our first assignments as a HRM team consisted of tasks relating to recruitment of prospective employees for the firm. During our team meetings, the team leaders proposed various ways of advertising the positional openings. Two of the female team members did suggest that the team change the way that they described the positions in advertisements, but the team leaders ridiculed them and suggested in somewhat impolite rhetoric that those team members were not in position to question the way that the team leaders phrased the position announcements, since English was the natural language of the team leaders and the two female members of the team who had criticized their choice of phrasing both spoke English as a foreign language. Since that exchange, those two female team members all but stopped contributing to the team discussions altogether and simply looked at one another quietly when they disagreed with the statements made by the team leaders. Generally, they had decided that the interpersonal consequences of disagreeing with the team leaders were worse than the consequences to the team of simply allowing the leaders to dictate how the team went about the business of recruitment.

Conclusion

Because the concerns of the two females on the team were not taken seriously and because the individuals in relative (or, in our case, perceived positions of power), they were able to discourage dissenting views or opinions from other well-meaning members of their team. Had they listened to their objections, the team leaders would have recognized that the concerns being expressed were completely valid and that the relatively small cost of adding a few more words to the advertisement announcing the job opening was well worth that small expense. Because they ignored those concerns and chose to save a very small amount of money, they ended up costing their organization much more money for placing an entirely new advertisement that reflected the additional wording that the two team members had originally tried to propose.

On a much smaller scale, this is precisely the same thing that happened on the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform: namely, junior-level team members expressed specific concerns to management; those concerns were ignored and further contribution of those team members discouraged by management. Ultimately, the organization suffered exactly the type of harm those team members had envisioned and it cost the organization much more than the relatively inexpensive fixes that would have been recommended by the dissenting team members if their opinions had been take more seriously by management.