Collaboration for the common good: An examination of challenges and adjustment processes in multicultural collaborations

• Author: Cristina Gibson,Rebekah Dibble
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.1872
• Date: 01 August 2013
• Published date: 01 August 2013

Collaboration for the common good: An

examination of challenges and adjustment

processes in multicultural collaborations

REBEKAH DIBBLE

1

*AND CRISTINA GIBSON

2

1

University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, U.S.A.

2

University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia

Summary Multicultural collaborations are temporary entities that are not embedded in a single organizational context

but yet complete tasks such as building a house or making a film with the involvement of people from

multiple cultures.Although they share characteristics of multiculturalteams, they lack many of the mechanisms

that teams embedded in organizations have at the ready to enable navigation of key challenges. Not much is

known about how they cope. Using an inductive approach, this study addresses four critical questions with

respect to multicultural collaborations. First, we sought to identify the most common challenges that

multicultural collaborations face. Second, we wanted to understand how multicultural collaborations react to

those challenges. Third, we examined the role of collaboration heterogeneity in the adjustment process.

Finally, we wanted to know whether adjustment facilitates collaboration performance. We examined these

issues using comprehensive field data from 16 multicultural humanitarian home-building collaborations that

ranged in theirdegree of cultural heterogeneity.Our analysis highlights manyimportant aspects of multicultural

collaborative work. First, adjustment processes were critical in coping with their lack of organizational

embeddedness.Second, collaborationsutilize a range of both internal andexternal strategies for adjusting.Third,

when collaborations experiencechallenges relatedto the way members work with eachother, cultural differences

may contribute to the ability to make important adjustments. Finally, when significant challenges existed,

adjustment processes were related to performance in multicultural collaborations, yet overadjustment was

detrimental, suggesting the importance of careful calibration of adjustment strategies to the magnitude and

nature of challenges that exist. Our findings have implications for theories of team processes and culture, as

well as practical implications for working across cultures. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: teams; collaboration; cross-cultural

A critical problem for organizational scholars of the 21st century is to begin to address the abundance of “organizing”

that takes place outside the realm of conventional teams embedded in organizations. For example, each morning all

over the world, retired men and women, parents and their teenage children, religious congregations, colleagues in the

corporate world, college students, contracted builders and suppliers, city and government officials, and a host of other

humanitarian-minded individuals come together in untested, unbalanced, and unexpected combinations to dig

foundations, mix cement, construct walls, and eventually complete entire homes. Each of these endeavors frequently

consists of individuals that run the gamut with respect to cultural origin, native language, age, experience, education,

and occupational background. Nevertheless, these somewhat hodgepodge collaborative efforts have resulted in the

completion of hundredsof thousands of homes, changing the lives of millionsof people around the world. Similar sorts

of collaborative efforts occur among actors, musicians, writers, and financiers for the production of a documentary

film and the integration of the skills and ideas of researchers, nonprofit service providers, government agencies,

and volunteer educators to provide educational programs in developing remote communities. As much of this type

of work occurs outside the boundaries of formal organizations and entails a much more fluid and permeable structure,

*Correspondence to: Rebekah Dibble,University of San Francisco,2130 Fulton Street,San Francisco, CA 94117,U.S.A. E-mail: rdibble@usfca.edu

Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 14 March 2012

Revised 01 February 2013, Accepted 23 April 2013

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 34, 764–790 (2013)

Published online 17 June 2013 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.1872

Special Issue Article

many established organizational methods and routines available to organizationally embedded multicultural teams

are nonexistent, hence magnifying and complicating the ability to cope with the new challenges that arise.

As a result, we shift the focusof prior inquiry from structured, stableteams that operate inside formal organizationsto

instead examinemulticultural collaborations,defined as temporary, multicultural,organizationally unembeddedentities

organized for the purpo se of pooling expertise, resources, inf ormation, or social networks to create a s pecific productor

service (Gibson & Dibble, 2008). Two defining characteristics of multicultural collaborations include their often

dynamic and highly diverse composition (e.g., they may include individuals from various functional backgrounds,

organizations, and national cultures) and their complex and often volatile environments (e.g., they may be required

to operate undersevere time constraints, in rapidly changingenvironmental conditions,or among a constantly changing

group of externalstakeholders) (Gibson & Dibble,2008). Whereas conventional organizations typicallydesign teams of

individuals that function together on an ongoing basis, collaborations are composed of collaborators with various

organizational affiliations (or no organizational affiliation, because they are independent contractors or individual

contributors) who converge for short periods and then disband. Inherent in this type of collaborative structure are

challenges relatedto the potential for interpersonal conflict, a lack of sharedunderstanding, loss of process knowledge,

and human resourceshortages as collaboratorsengage and disengage. Whereasconventional organizationshouse entire

departments responsible for documenting challenges and implementing and routinizing solutions in knowledge

management systems or online repositories, the more dynamic forms of collaboration we focus on here face the

challenge of operating with limited resources to devote to organizational change. Whereas traditional teams in

organizations operate in conjunction with a fairly established, stable, and reoccurring set of external stakeholders

(e.g., long-term clients, suppliers, and community stakeholders), collaborations may face a new set of external

stakeholders for each collaborative objective (e.g., each home-building endeavor, each film project, and each

humanitarian relief effort), hence reducing the predictability of the external environment. In an organization context,

there may be risk mitigation protocols,templates for project management,cycles of reporting on milestones, diagnostic

tools, and perhaps even an organizational development staff to assist in identifying challenges, proactively managing

them, and developing skills in responding and adjusting to them. These are unlikely to exist in a collaboration.

Prior research has highlighted a variety of change processes in collaborative entities. For example, the literature

on role reconfiguration (Arrow & McGrath, 1993), the use of negotiated role structures (Bechky, 2006), the

incorporation of strategies to reduce miscommunication (Katz & Te’eni, 2007), improvisation (Moorman & Miner,

1998; Samra, Lynn,& Reilly, 2008), bricolage (Baker & Nelson,2005), mutual adjustment (Zimmermann& Sparrow,

2007), external activities (e.g., Ancona & Caldwell, 1992), “x-teams”(Ancona, Bresman, & Kaeufer, 2002), and

research on how environmental contingencies might require a particular leadership approach (Fiedler, 1964) all

address ways in which members of teams might cope with change. However, much of this research has taken place

inside an overarching organization and recognizes the support that organizational embeddedness provides. So we are

left to wonder, without such infrastructure, what stimuli might prompt changes, and how might multiculturalism play

a role in responding to them?

In fact, some of the most interesting and perplexing challenges that collaborations currently face are related to the

cultural complexity that often exists in collaborative structures. As Salas and Gelfand (2011, JOB special issue call

for papers) noted, “differences in culture and viewpoint can...lead to misunderstandings and interaction problems.

Therefore, there is a pressing need to understand the processes and influences of intercultural collaboration and

negotiation as well as how to manage the process to result in the most effective outcomes possible.”In multicultural

collaborations, the challenges of cultural diversity are dramatically compounded by the lack of organizational

embeddedness and the dynamism that accompanies it. Current theory and research have not addressed this important

interaction in any substantial depth. We know very little about the process and emergent characteristics that might

predict multicultural collaboration effectiveness, as they experience these unique challenges. For example, one

common method of addressing cultural challenges is learning by doing and reflecting (Coultas, Grossman, Feitosa,

Salas, & Carter, 2012), yet the fluid and temporary nature of collaborations may make it impossible to accumulate

such learning, and there is likely no organizational system or processes to facilitate it. Because the challenges

inherent in multicultural collaborations are relevant to much of modern work (particularly with the expansion of

CHALLENGES AND ADJUSTMENT PROCESSES IN MULTICULTURAL COLLABORATIONS 765

Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Organiz. Behav. 34, 764–790 (2013)

DOI: 10.1002/job