Research On Intercultural Teams At Multinational Companies

Intercultural communication is an emerging research subject, since the massive expansion of globalization led by multi-national enterprises. This subject has been drawing more and more attentions along with the mergers and acquisition of large enterprises with different nationalities, because it's more than just to reorganize different buildings and plants, but to combine people with different cultural backgrounds, which would be so much more complicated and difficult.I've always been interested in the culture differences and intercultural conflicts. And I regard a multi-national working team would be the best little world to present all the collisions of different cultures, since the collisions will be so real and unavoidable, reflecting from everyday contacts, verbal and nonverbal. There's another important reason why I focus on this intercultural team management subject and able to do some research. I have been doing a long-term internship in one of the Fortune 500 enterprises, Continental Group of Germany. Continental entered China only a few years ago, hadn't been completely localized, and is now still going through difficulties brought by different nationalities. So I choose it as my suitable research resources. And that's why I will focus my research on Chinese-German teamsIn this paper, I will first introduce the concept and theories regarding culture, intercultural conflict as well as team theories. Then I will introduce the team status in Continental, and start a questionnaire to analysis the real situation within these bi-cultural teams, together with my personal experience regarding these teams. Finally I will go to my conclusions and suggestions regarding Chinese-German teams as well as intercultural teams in general.