1 Acknowledging the challenges
One of the issues that has been identified with cross-cultural working is that prejudice and stereotypes exist, and they can get in the way of a team working well together. Everyone feels more comfortable when they are with like-minded people, in fact it’s not unusual for all employees of a particular workplace to slowly adopt the same style of dress over time.
Take a moment to reflect on how you have felt when someone has joined your team who seems different from you in some way. It may be the way they dress, or what they say or do. How does this make you feel? It may be that your initial thoughts are not positive, but acknowledging this is an important element of self-awareness. Once you have identified any negative thoughts, you can start to do something about them.
When you are working in culturally diverse teams, it is important to overcome these initial feelings and find ways of working comfortably together. As you have seen in previous weeks, it is this very diversity and the difference in viewpoints that can lead to great ideas and ways of working.
Recognising prejudice has to be the starting point of this and you will now look at one model of social identity theory first proposed by Tajfel and Turner in 1979.