Metaphor Study Of Team Concepts By Chinese Employees: Chinese Corporates And U.S.Multinationals In China

Facing the pressure from globalization and challenging marketplace, many organizations which seek improved efficiency have embraced teams. They have changed their methods of organizing work from assigning jobs to individuals to assigning large clusters of tasks to teams, changes which are altering the very shape of modern business. The adoption of the team approach has become so widespread that some authors argue that teams are now virtually ubiquitous in all human endeavors. The prevalence of teams has prompted an increase in research on teamwork and with the expansion of multinationals, a spur of efforts has been made to investigate differences in teamwork across cultures. However, cross-cultural literature on teams lacks a comprehensive framework for understanding those differences. Gibson and Zellmer-Bruhn applied cognitive approach to teamwork studies and developed a conceptual framework to explain different understandings of the concept of teamwork across national and organizational cultures. Five different metaphors for teamwork (military, sports, community, family, and associates) were derived to reveal the different mental pictures and expectations employees held about teams across nations and organizations.The present research extends Gibson and Zellmer-Bruhn's research into the information and communication industry in China and explores the metaphors Chinese employees use to describe their teams and the variances in the metaphors employed by the Chinese people respectively working in Chinese corporates and the U.S. multinationals in China. Hofstede's cultural dimensions and Lakoff s metaphor theory serve as the theory framework for the thesis and content analysis as the methodology. The author conducted in-depth interviews with 32 employees in four Chinese corporates and four American multinationals. The interviews were transcribed and formed a text database. The metaphorical language was identified and categorized into the five teamwork metaphors and finally resulted in a frequency distribution. SAS software was employed to conduct t-test, cluster analysis, factor analysis and regression analysis of the original data. The results confirmed that great variances exist in the teamwork metaphors usebetween Chinese companies and American companies.The research sheds a light on both theoretical field and practical field. Theoretically, it serves with the sample of Chinese employees as a strong support to the framework developed by Gibson and Zellmer-Bruhn to explain different understandings of the concept of teamwork across cultures;practically, through these metaphors managers and coworkers can have a rough outline of how Chinese employees define team, what expectations they hold about teams in terms of scope, role, membership and objective, and how to resolve the conflicts arising out of different expectations about teams.