Common Interest and Tolerance: Synergy as a Challenge for Heterogeneous Teams. A Qualitative Study of Six Multicultural Workgroups at University

Abstract

O ne of the consequences of the international context is the growing number of workgroups of people from different countries, commonly referred to as "multicultural teams". The apparent difficulty that they encounter in implementing a collective project seems to stem from their heterogeneous composition, considered a handicap for really working in teams. Indeed, previous studies have highlighted the role played in workgroup performance by interpersonal congruence. They define this notion as the degree to which workgroup members see each other's in the same way (Polzer et al. , 2002). The heterogeneity of referents is a potential source of dysfunctions which can generate conflicts (Pelled, 1996), freeze the collective work (O'Reilly et al. , 1993), and bring about the dissolution of the workgroup. However, numerous researchers in different fields have shown that the effect of shared action is greater than the sum of the effects to be expected if the actors had acted independently (Greco et al. , 1995; Vignat, 2012).