managing multicultural freelance teams

Multicultural Management
Analysis of the Field
The topic of multicultural management has received significant attention for around three decades, when the first research on the benefits of diversity in the workforce started to emerge, at around the same time as people started noticing the increasing degree of diversity in many workplaces. If workplaces lacked diversity before, by the 1980s that was no longer the case. The study has continued since, evolving to take into account changes in demographics, advances in thought, and changing realities of the workforce.
The particular field of virtual teams started to gain attention in the late 1990s, as the Internet started to facilitate greater levels of interaction between dispersed workforces, and academia sought to explore the unique differences between leading these teams and leading a more conventional non-dispersed team (Oakley, 1999). It was around that time that offshoring became more than just moving factories overseas, but started to incorporate services such as call centers. The next, natural step was the development of virtual teams, and companies realized that they could tap into a global talent pool, thereby alleviating the need to hire only within the context of the availability talent in a particular geography. The literature on virtual teams probably peaked in the early 2000s, but work in the field has continued to the present day.
However, the next evolution in the global workforce has now taken place, and the literature has not kept up with it. In any organization, if a virtual team is entirely working for the same company, then they are immersed in a common organizational culture, which can be used to anchor the diverse cultures (Symons & Stenzel, 2007). While the research on this part of multicultural management is starting to catch up with technology, the research has not caught up to the increasing use of freelancers, and their use in multicultural dispersed teams.
Thus, there is presently a gap between the current state of research in multicultural management with respect to the use of international freelancers. Freelancers, by their nature, lack the anchor that organizational culture provides. Thus, a manager trying to build a company using freelancers has workers that are multicultural, living in their own culture and only communicating via digital means, and on top of that not enculturated into the organization. Thus, multicultural management is becoming more complex, and the different new dimensions that freelancing adds are not necessarily understood as of yet.
Research Topic
There are no current theories or debates on the topic. The entire point was to choose a topic that was a gap in the literature. However, this is a topic where work can be built on prior work on both multicultural teams and on virtual teams. Purvanova (2014) discusses the differences between face-to-face and virtual teams, for example. That work can be built upon to examine what happens today when people can do videoconferencing as a means of building at least a little bit of virtual interaction.
There are also valuable threads of research elsewhere in the multicultural management literature. Eisenberg and Mattarelli (2017) provide valuable insight into the role of multicultural brokers in facilitating knowledge sharing within and between globally-dispersed multicultural teams. The value of people who are bi- or multi-cultural themselves, or who are from a more global background such as major world cities where multiculturalism is the norm (London, Toronto, New York, etc) can play a valuable role in identifying and mediating conflict, especially because in a virtual setting conflict is not always apparent immediately.
Shokef and Erez (2015) point out that cultural intelligence is a vital factor in conflict amelioration in these teams, and there are significant benefits to fostering a global identity. Stocking a virtual team with people who have a global identity mindset is much less risky from a conflict standpoint than stocking a team of people with a more provincial outlook. This might have important implications for virtual freelance teams, because veteran freelancers are more likely to have work in international settings before, and been through some of the issues that tend to affect newcomers. These veterans can be tapped for leadership, even if just informal leadership.
It is reasonable to hypothesize that research on effective virtual, multicultural teams can be applied, at least in part, to virtual freelance teams. For example, Lisak and Erez (2015) found that cultural intelligence, global identity and openness to cultural diversity are all associated with one’s ability to emerge as a leader in a global virtual team. Among freelancers, there still needs to be a rapid pace of norming, and having people who are naturally going to emerge as leaders is an important aspect of the team dynamic. Understanding what kinds of people you want to emerge as leaders, or who are suitable for those roles, can be built into the process of identifying the right freelance candidates to join the team.
Industries Affected
It is not unreasonable to expect that a lot of industries will be affected by this topic. Workforce diversity is increasing around the world, but of course some industries will be the leading edge of this trend. Software is one of the industries that is dealing with the freelance aspect in particular. The short version of the story is that while almost all of the world’s software companies are headquartered in a handful of highly-developed economies, labor mobility is insufficient to meet the demands that these companies have for talent. Many firms rely on freelancers to fill in the gaps in the local labor pool, in particular for software developers, who are not only frequently in scarce supply but also expensive. Tapping into labor pools in Eastern Europe, India, Latin America – and Africa is probably not that far behind – is going to be critical to keeping the pace of economic development high in the software industry. The right talent may always be dispersed, and in many cases there is not an ongoing need for the talent, but rather there is a need for the talent to be available sporadically, i.e. freelance.
While software development is arguably the first frontier, the second is in all likelihood creative talent. There are two different reasons for this. One is that many companies have no particular need for full-time creative talent, and this talent has skills that are difficult to replace – at least on the professional level. The second reason creative talent is an emerging territory for this field of study is that creative talent in particular can be part-time (to leave time for personal projects), or enter the freelance workforce as a means to make additional money over and above their regular job. While developers are usually working for software companies, almost every company has some need – at least sporadically – for writers, graphic designers, video producers, animators, and the like.
Thus, the rising use of freelancers in the global virtual team context. The impact of this rise in the use of freelancers is expected to be positive, better aligning available labor pools with demand for that labor, thereby increasing economic efficiency, and facilitating organization growth and expansion. To maximize this rise, however, leaders and project managers need to understand not only what it means to lead in a multicultural context, and a virtual context, but to do so with freelance workers, who might work in multiple different companies, and have no shared organizational culture to serve as an anchor, as would otherwise be the case with a dispersed team that at least works in the same organization and therefore has some shared culture and goals. Being able to understand the pitfalls, and who to eliminate them, and being able to understand how to optimize these teams, is going to allow businesses to maximize the positive effects of tapping into this new labor resource.
Future Directions
Thus, it is time to start researching what the emergence of freelancers as a major part of global virtual, multicultural teams actually means. The normal team-building process of storming, norming, etc., may look different in this context than in the other contexts, or it might look much the same. The key is that at this point, the subject has received little to no attention in the academic literature and therefore the body of knowledge on the topic is rather limited. The leaders and managers who are faced with this precise situation have no professional guidance, and at this point are muddling through, doing the best they can with the information that they have on hand.
The starting point right now would be to identify the differences between what we already know about managing multicultural teams, and managing virtual teams (especially multicultural ones), and then adding in the freelance element. At this point, some of the potential issues to be explored have been identified, such as poor communication, lack of processes, delays in disseminating centralized terminology, ideas and concepts, and quality compromises (Yahaya, 2008).
This field is just emerging, and is expected to continue to increase in usage as technologies advance. Companies want to use global virtual freelance teams in order to accelerate project completion, and in order to reduce costs, especially for companies located in expensive metropolitan areas, or areas with skills shortages (or both). There are countries with solid education systems that are producing talent with nobody to work for, and there are countries with high demands for talent but skills shortages. As technology enables these two groups to come together and align labor needs with company needs, it is expected that global virtual freelance teams will be come increasingly common over the next 3-5 years. Furthermore, they are likely to expand beyond the most common realms of development and creative, into other spheres.
As such, it is important to start research into this phenomenon, in order to provide a much greater level of guidance, and build on the experiences of companies that already do this sort of thing. It would seem that at the very least, it is going to be important to identify what differences exist between teams with freelancers and teams without, and then figure out what the best practices are for optimizing those teams, and if those best practices differ from current best practices in multicultural management and in the leadership of global virtual teams. It is expected that this field will be a fairly important area of study going forward, and it is almost surprising that it has not been subject to more exploration to this point.
Recommendations
There are a couple of key recommendations for leaders in industry, pending the results of future academic research. The first big one is to recognize that there are likely going to be differences between what we know about leading virtual teams or multicultural teams, and leading those same teams where there is a high percentage of freelance workers. It is important to recognize that freelancers do not have the same stake in organizational success, nor the same access to acculturation that in-house workers have. At best, they can be indoctrinated into a team culture. But in situations where the entire team is new, and freelance, even that might be a stretch. Recognition of this reality, and that there is no academic guidance, is important.
The second recommendation is that managers should stay tuned to the research on this subject. Whether this research is in trade publications like Harvard Business Review or in academic journals doesn’t matter much. The fact that this is such an emerging field means that any information that emerges is going to be fresh, new and insightful. Managers should be on the lookout for anything that might help them build these teams out, or identify best practices.
The third recommendation is that experienced managers, who have proven ability and built in competencies to manage multicultural teams, are necessary if a freelance team does consist of people from different cultures. Especially if each worker is dependent on others. Basic project management skills are not sufficient. Having someone with experience in similar situations is far better than using a leader who lacks this experience. If imperfect experience is as good as it gets right now, then imperfect experience is the best choice. Waiting for perfect knowledge is specifically not recommended.
The final recommendation is that until the issues have been clearly identified and best practices established, it might be better to use your in-house team for the highest priority work, and use the freelance team to do work of lower importance, if at all possible, as a risk mitigation strategy.
References

Eisenberg, J. & Mattarelli, E. (2017) Building bridges in global virtural teams: The role of multicultural brokers in overcoming the negative effects of identity threats on knowledge sharing in subgroups. Journal of International Management. Vol. 23 (4) 399-411.

Lisak, A. & Erez, M. (2015) Leadership emergence in multicultural teams: The power of global characteristics. Journal of World Business. Vol. 50 (1) 3-14.

Oakley, J. (1999) Leadership processes in virtual teams and organizations. Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies. Vol. 5 (3) 3-17.

Purvanova, R. K. (2014). Face-to-face versus virtual teams: What have we really learned? The Psychologist-Manager Journal, 17(1), 2–29. doi:10.1037/mgr0000009

Shokef, E. & Erez, M. (2015) Cultural intelligence and global identity in multicultural teams. Handbook of Cultural Intelligence, Chapter 11.

Symons, J. & Stenzel, C. (2007) Virtually borderless: An examination of culture in virtual teaming. Journal of General Management. Doi: 0.1177/030630700703200301

Yahaya F. (2008) Managing complex translation projects through virtual spaces: A case study. Strategic Agenda LLP. Retrieved March 19, 2019 from http://mt-archive.info/Aslib-2008-Yahaya.pdf