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...
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.