Leadership Competencies, Inter-Cultural Differences and Performance of Multinational Teams

Abstract

Abstract As a result of a global, interdependent and culturally diverse business environment, different kinds of multinational teams emerged in order to respond to these challenges. Since capable and qualified team leaders, who are able to utilize the potential coming from different cultural origins and encourage teams to deliver high performance, are crucial for organisations, the debate about the necessity to develop new suitable team leaders’ cross-cultural competencies evolved. Applying Trompenaars and Woolliams (2000)’s transcultural competence concept, which is based on the idea that there exist different original approaches to general problems that occur in all cultures and how to deal with them using list of seven bipolar dimensions and derived cultural dilemmas, seems to be suitable as it is quite unexplored in given geographical Eastern Europe context and at the same time is it a demonstrative example of one of many cross-cultural models. Using research design based on subjectivism and social constructivism philosophy, inductive research approach and qualitative research method, together with non-probability, purposive sampling, semi structured, non-standardized interviews and coding used for data analysis, the research question: “How does the team leader’s transcultural competence reconcile cultural dilemmas in IT Company U&SLUNO in Eastern Europe? “ is gradually answered through the examination of the existence of team leader’s transcultural competence in U&SLUNO’s competency framework, followed by exploration of how team leader’s transcultural competence reconciles cultural dilemmas in U&SLUNO and finally by the identification of gaps in developing and applying transcultural competence by team leaders of multinational teams.