Multicultural Management in Global Virtual Freelance Teams

Introduction to Multicultural Management Research

The topic of multicultural management has received significant attention for around three decades, since the first research on the benefits of workforce diversity began to emerge. This occurred at roughly the same time that people started noticing the increasing degree of diversity in many workplaces. If workplaces lacked diversity before the 1980s, that was no longer the case by that decade's end. The field has continued to evolve since, taking into account changes in demographics, advances in thought, and the changing realities of the workforce.

The particular field of virtual teams began to attract attention in the late 1990s, as the Internet facilitated greater levels of interaction between dispersed workforces and academia sought to explore the unique differences between leading these teams and leading more conventional, non-dispersed teams (Oakley, 1999). It was around that time that offshoring grew beyond simply moving factories overseas and began to incorporate services such as call centers. The next natural step was the development of virtual teams, as companies realized they could tap into a global talent pool, thereby alleviating the need to hire only within the constraints of locally available talent. The literature on virtual teams likely peaked in the early 2000s, but work in the field has continued to the present day.

The Rise of Virtual Teams and the Freelance Gap

The global workforce has undergone yet another evolution, and the literature has not kept pace with it. In any organization where a virtual team works entirely for the same company, team members are immersed in a common organizational culture, which can serve as an anchor for diverse individual cultures (Symons & Stenzel, 2007). While research on this dimension of multicultural management is beginning to catch up with technology, it has not yet caught up with the increasing use of freelancers or their role in multicultural dispersed teams.

There is presently a gap between the current state of research in multicultural management and the realities of working with international freelancers. Freelancers, by their nature, lack the anchor that organizational culture provides. A manager attempting to build a team using freelancers is working with people who are multicultural, living within their own cultural contexts, communicating only through digital means, and not enculturated into the organization. Multicultural management is thus becoming more complex, and the new dimensions that freelancing introduces are not yet well understood.

References

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