| dc.description.abstract | Globalization has driven international business to a new stage of development.. The philosophy
to 'think global, act local' to meet the diverse needs of the organization, host country regulatory
requirements and better understand the local cultures of the clientele base has led to the
engagement of foreign nationals managers in the work force. MNCs have been faced with
diverse challenges with this move, one of the principle ones being the challenge of
communication across cultures. This research is a case study of Oxfam Great Britain Kenya with
the objective of finding out the effect of communication on the performance of multicultural
work teams.
Some of the principal findings of the study are that that multicultural team communication is
varied and hence there is the task of ensuring that the messages communicated are decoded by all
persons from the different cultural backgrounds in the same way; that communication cuts across
the team regardless of the cultural background and being a core backbone of the functioning of
any organization, poor communication has been known to paralyze operations leading to poor
work performance and that communication in a multicultural setting is a complex activity that
requires similarly complex systems to ensure common approaches and understanding Some of the recommendations include that there should be more informal interactions between
the teams to enhance bonding; all communication should consider the diversity of the audience;
the organization should consider the use of translators where difficulties in understanding the
official language are evident and there ought to be more face-face communication in order to be
able to understand and embrace non-verbal ques. | en |
