Management Of Cultural Differences In Multinational Teams

Assurance of efficiency and productivity of multinational teams necessitates policies, rules, and procedures covering underlying characteristics of team members’ home country cultures, potential cross-cultural conflicts and their solutions, cultural awareness in the organization, and harmonization mechanisms for different cultures with the organizational culture, etc. In spite of ever-increasing importance, studies addressing multinational teams and cultural differences simultaneously are insufficient in quantity. This study aims to contribute to the literature on management of multinational project teams and to make suggestions for people who are in charge of managing multinational and multicultural teams to develop policies, rules, and procedures. Among the underlying findings are; the Marmaray Project team has demonstrated characteristics that can be explained by “Guided Missile” model, a need for training programs related to cultural differences, need for social activities for team members, and a need for more effective leadership.