Fragile alliances: Negotiating global teaming in a turbulent environment

Julia Catherine Gluesing, Wayne State University

Abstract

This study examines how employees working together across geographic distances understand their roles and negotiate common work practices within a global teaming context. Internationalization and the global marketplace have brought cross-cultural teams into the forefront as a particular kind of work group that is the basic structural and functional unit on which international or global organization is founded. Since global teams are a relatively new phenomenon, an ethnographic approach using inductive, naturalistic research and a grounded theory methodology were used to capture the complexity of the multiple cultural realities in the global teams, and the interrelated conditions in which their work was embedded. The results of the study include a process model of global teaming that advances the notion that global teams negotiate across multiple cultural realities using specific types of strategies to balance power relations and build connections--to communicate, integrate relationships, structure process, do work and facilitate their interactions. In a turbulent international marketplace and uncertain organizational environment the alliances formed in global teams are fragile. Five propositions about the relationship between the probability of success, global teaming strategies and turbulence, are offered as a starting point for further research about the process of global teaming. In the process of successful global teaming members both respond to the structured conditions within which they work, and alter those conditions through practice. They negotiate meaning and create a new set of assumptions and practices that serve to guide their actions and interactions in the global team setting. The team members "improvise" an emergent team culture, or "composite" culture, that becomes a shared cultural identity for the team members, and a basis for an emergent global culture as well. Understanding the process of global teaming contributes to a reconceptualization of the culture concept, and the production and reproduction of group identity, that reflects the complex cultural settings that characterize a modern globalized world.

Recommended Citation

Julia Catherine Gluesing, "Fragile alliances: Negotiating global teaming in a turbulent environment" (January 1, 1995). ETD Collection for Wayne State University. Paper AAI9613463.
http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/dissertations/AAI9613463