Cross-Cultural Work Groups

How can culture influence the way a group operates? What happens when members of different cultural groups interact in a common work group? What impact do relationships among different cultural groups in society at large have on intra- and intergroup relationships within organizations? What management practices promote effective cross-cultural work groups? Cross-cultural work groups are a reality in most contemporary organizations, yet the research into them has been dispersed among a variety of disciplines. This volume, the tenth in a series of books growing out of the Claremont Symposium on Applied Social Psychology, pulls together findings from several disciplines and presents the most recent research available on cross-cultural work groups. It explores issues that are often present when different cultural groups are brought together, including prejudice, discrimination, ethnocentrism, and intergroup dynamics. Scholarship in this area has traditionally emphasized studies of homogeneous groups or studies of diverse groups that ignore the effects of cultural differences on group interaction; however, the contributions in this volume avoid these pitfalls and look squarely at the forces operating on groups comprising persons from varied cultures.