Working in a culturally diverse team is extremely enriching. The diversity helps each team member develop a productive flexibility, improve the adaptation skills and creates an environment where people can learn from each other.

However, at times, a culturally diverse team can also be a source of frustration since it represents a wide span of differences in approaches, views, beliefs, and values.

Challenges in multicultural teams are also partly due to different styles of communication or other reasons such as language skills and the accents, different attitudes towards hierarchy and conflicting norms for decision-making.

Such cultural differences can create substantial obstacles to effective teamwork. These obstacles can sometimes be invisible or difficult to recognise until they cause serious problems, impacting the teamwork. To work in a multicultural team effectively, we need to recognise the underlying causes of cultural conflict and manage these well.

Indeed, the cultural challenges are manageable if the leaders and team members can develop cultural competence, choose the right strategy and avoid imposing monocultural approaches on multicultural situations.