how cultures influence teams

The Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) is organized through the Executive Office of the President and works to coordinate and administer trade policies all over the globe (USTR, N.d.). USTR provides trade policy leadership and negotiating expertise in its major areas of responsibility, including such services as:

• Bilateral, regional and multilateral trade and investment issues

• Expansion of market access for American goods and services

• International commodity agreements

• Negotiations affecting U.S. import policies

• Oversight of the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) and Section 301 complaints

• Trade, commodity, and direct investment matters managed by OECD and others

• Trade-related intellectual property protection issues

• World Trade Organization (WTO) issues

In order to provide such ambitious services in the effort to further world trade, the USTR works directly with the US Congress as well as team of external advisors, which includes approximately seven hundred professionals organized into multiple tiers, who ensures that the USTR represents the US and their interest during any trade negotiations.

The US currently has trade agreements in force with twenty countries in all the major regions of the world. Interestingly, the website states that the US has completed negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement and is in negotiations of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) with the European Union, which is likely outdated given the fact that the newly elected president has cancelled these agreements before they were enacted. The USTR also is categorized into different issues in which they consider when drafting any trade agreements which include agriculture, environment, labor, and many more. However, since this is a function of the Executive Branch, it is likely that many of the issues will be reprioritized when the new president's priorities are listed.

Dr. Robert House from the University of Pennsylvania conceived of a large-scale international study of culture, leadership, and organizational practices in the early 1990s, and since that time the Global Leadership & Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness (GLOBE) project has expanded to more than 200 researchers from 62 countries and has become one of the largest, most prestigious and most comprehensive studies of its kind in the social sciences (GLOBE, N.d.). The organization has published prolifically since its inception and well respected in the field. The group has also published a cohort of research that has identified nine different cultural competencies that are related to different regions of the world.

These cultural competencies consist of a wide array of different factors that are influenced by the cultural differences found in organizations in various regions and the ways that components of different group dynamics play out. One interesting cultural competency that is more detailed than other models is the collectivism category. This category is broken down into an institutional collectivism category as well as an in-group collectivism category. Other models simply compile these two factors into a single category, however it seems like further delineation could provide a more insightful representation of intercultural group dynamics. Another interesting aspect of the work is that the research has also attempted to identify how different aspects of leadership are culturally dependent.

It is reasonable to believe that not every leadership style will work effectively in different types of national and organizational cultures. The GLOBE designed a questionnaire with 112 leader attributes and behaviors items which included a wide variety of traits, skills, behaviors, and abilities potentially relevant to leadership emergence and effectiveness, using over seventeen thousand survey responses from managers all over the world. The results of this study could be one of the most invaluable resource for any manager who is working in a culture that is not their own, or also if they are working with international employees or teams. Given the fact that globalization is steadily increasing, this research is likely to more salient indefinitely into the future.

Works Cited

GLOBE. (N.d.). About the Foundation. Retrieved from GLOBE: http://globeproject.com/foundation

USTR. (N.d.). Mission of the USTR. Retrieved from Office of the United States Trade Representative: https://ustr.gov/about-us/about-ustr