The Effect of Communication on Performance of Multicultural Work Teams at Oxfam Great Britain Kenya

Abstract

Globalization has driven international business to a new stage of development.. The philosophy to 'think global, act local' to meet the diverse needs of the organization, host country regulatory requirements and better understand the local cultures of the clientele base has led to the engagement of foreign nationals managers in the work force. MNCs have been faced with diverse challenges with this move, one of the principle ones being the challenge of communication across cultures. This research is a case study of Oxfam Great Britain Kenya with the objective of finding out the effect of communication on the performance of multicultural work teams. Some of the principal findings of the study are that that multicultural team communication is varied and hence there is the task of ensuring that the messages communicated are decoded by all persons from the different cultural backgrounds in the same way; that communication cuts across the team regardless of the cultural background and being a core backbone of the functioning of any organization, poor communication has been known to paralyze operations leading to poor work performance and that communication in a multicultural setting is a complex activity that requires similarly complex systems to ensure common approaches and understanding Some of the recommendations include that there should be more informal interactions between the teams to enhance bonding; all communication should consider the diversity of the audience; the organization should consider the use of translators where difficulties in understanding the official language are evident and there ought to be more face-face communication in order to be able to understand and embrace non-verbal ques.