Project Management Deployment – the Role of Cultural Factors

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(1997) suggested that organizational demography studies had overemphasized a direct link between demographic characteristics and outcomes without sufficiently describing intervening psychological and social constructs. However, Early and Mosakowskis model suggests that a hybrid team culture represents a pattern of intervening constructs generated by self-definition and members’ perceptions of one another.

3. The optimal degree of team heterogeneity

Knowing the optimal degree of team heterogeneity can help companies to carry out certain projects with the greatest possible quality of performance. According to the Early and Mosakowskis hypothesis 1 and 2, short-term and critically punctuated projects should be done by a homogeneous team, while long-term projects should better be processed by highly heterogeneous teams. If a project can be completed more quickly due to the fact that its processing team has the right amount of heterogeneity, costs for the company can be decreased. To be more specific: A company planning to realise a long term project should consider creating a highly heterogeneous team working on it. The reason for this can be found in Early and Mosakowskis tested hypothesis 2, which says that highly heterogeneous teams will outperform other teams and be more satisfied with their own performance. More satisfied employees also can help to raise future performances and work atmosphere in general inside a company. However, this might only work in teams with a flat hierarchy, since Kirkman, Tesluk and Rosen (2004) found out that demographic dissimilarity between team leaders and their teams are negatively related to team empowerment and effectiveness. The works of Hoyte, Greenwood and Gong (2010) also revealed that the optimal degree of heterogeneity is crucial for companies. Their study demonstrated that the extent to which members shared the same understanding of the task and the team, also referred to as mental models (Blickensderfer, Cannon-Bowers and Salas, 1997), had positive effects on team performance. However, too many of these shared models are likely to restrict team flexibility and to diminish team performance. (Hoyte, Greenwood and Gong, 2010) This phenomenon was also proven for sports teams, whose performance was first increasing and became decreasing as the team level tacit knowledge accumulated (Berman, Down and Hill, 2002). 4

4. Explanation of table 3

Table 3 provides the results of study 2. In this study 92 participants were dived into three teams, a homogeneous, a split and a heterogeneous team. These teams consisted of each four persons and had to solve two different tasks separated by a 30 minute break for discussing and planning said tasks. The homogeneous team consisted of 4 members from the same country, while the heterogeneous team consisted of members from four different countries. The split team consisted of two members from one country and the other two from another country. In the first task, the homogeneous teams outperformed the mixed and the heterogeneous teams. The homogeneous teams rated their perceptible efficacy better than the other groups and also had the highest level of performance. However after the second task, the heterogeneous teams’ level of performance and communication were rated better than the mixed teams and even better than the homogeneous teams who performed best during the first task. They also had the highest rating for efficacy and planning and were as well more satisfied with their work than the mixed and even the homogeneous team.

This means, given sufficient time to work with each other, a heterogeneous team will outperform any mixed or homogeneous team. IV

List of literature

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