Cross-cultural communication in global teams: Challenges and effective strategies collaboration in multinational corporations

The research aims at investigating the communication challenges that members of global team’s face in the course of their collaboration to offset tasks. The business landscape is becoming increasingly globalized with members of various teams being drawn from culturally diverse backgrounds. This is common in multinational organizations where a team of workers can comprise of persons from different cultural settings. Therefore, the study utilizes semi-structured interviews with 15 professionals from various MNCs to unravel the communication challenges they faced and the strategies they used to foster cross-cultural communications in within their teams. The findings of the study indicate that language barrier poses a significant challenge in cross-cultural communication. The varying levels of masterly of corporate languages was found to be a significant hindrance to effective communication. Additionally, non-verbal cues were found to be misinterpreted, causing a major hindrance to cross-cultural communication. The participants asserted that cultural training, communication protocols, and utilization of technology play a big role in enhancing cross-cultural communication. The study also finds out that leadership plays major role in mitigating cross-cultural communication hindrances. The study contributes to literature on cross-cultural communication by highlighting the challenges likely to be faced by members of global teams. Further, the study proposes solutions that can enable managers to mitigate the challenges and enhance the functionality of the global teams.