Metaphors and Meaning: An Intercultural Analysis of the Concept of Teamwork

Administrative Science Quarterly,  June, 2001  by Cristina B. Gibson,  Mary E. Zellmer-Bruhn

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This paper develops a conceptual framework to explain different understandings of the concept of teamwork across national and organizational cultures. Five different metaphors for teamwork (military, sports, community, family, and associates) were derived from the language team members used during interviews in four different geographic locations of six multinational corporations. Results indicated that use of the teamwork metaphors varies across countries and organizations, after controlling for gender, team function, and total words in an interview. Analyses of specific relationships between national cultural values and categories of metaphor use and between dimensions of organizational culture and categories of metaphor use revealed patterns of expectations about team roles, scope, membership, and objectives that arise in different cultural contexts. We discuss the implications of this variance for future research on teams and the management of teams in multinational organizations.

The past two decades have witnessed a steady increase in research investigating differences in teamwork across cultures. This research has identified variance across cultural contexts in team processes, such as social loafing and conflict (Cox, Label, and McLeod, 1991; Earley, 1994; Oetzel, 1998), team leadership (Ayman and Chemers, 1983; Pillai and Meindl, 1998), goal setting (Earley and Erez, 1987; Erez and Somech, 1996), teams' beliefs about performance (Gibson, 1999), and employees' receptivity to working in teams (Kirkman and Shapiro, 2001; Kirkman, Gibson, and Shapiro, 2001). Taken together, these studies suggest important differences in teamwork across cultures, yet the cross-cultural literature on teams lacks a comprehensive framework for understanding why these differences occur (Earley and Gibson, 2001). In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by exploring the underlying differences in the definition of teamwork that people hold, represented by the metaphors they use to describe their teams. Veri fying that national and organizational cultures are sources of variance in conceptualizations of teamwork has the potential to provide insight into the differences in preferred practices that have been noted across cultural contexts in other empirical research and challenges scholars to build specific theories of teamwork that incorporate these differences.

Even if the specific content of teamwork conceptualizations varies across cultures, at a general level, most definitions are likely to include what a team does (activity scope), who is on the team (roles) and why (nature of membership), and why the team exists (objectives) (e.g., see reviews of team definitions in Cohen and Bailey, 1997; Sundstrom et al., 1999). For example, when some people think of a team, they picture a project team whose activity is limited to the time during which members work on the project, whereas others may picture a team more like a family whose activity is broad and extends across a number of domains in life (McGrath, 1984). Likewise, some concepts of teamwork may include clearly differentiated roles, such as leaders and members, whereas others may be less structured (Cohen and Bailey, 1997). When some people think about teamwork they picture voluntary membership, whereas for others membership is not necessarily a matter of choice (Bar-Tal, 1990). Finally, some peopie define teamwo rk by clear outcomes; others have argued that multiple, sometimes implicit benefits can be derived (McGrath, 1984).

Previous empirical demonstrations of differences in team processes and practices across cultures may be due to these different mental pictures (or definitions). Ayman and Chemers (1983) found that sensitivity to group norms was a more important element of leader behavior in Iran and Mexico than in the U.S. This may be true because team members in Iran and Mexico had a conception of teamwork that included clear leader roles, while team members in the U.S. may have had a less role-oriented conception and thus expected the leader to pay less attention to role-related elements such as norms. In a similar vein, Pillai and Meindl (1998) demonstrated that charismatic group leadership is more prevalent in collectivistic (e.g., group-oriented) cultures. This could be due to a conception of a team as a broad, encompassing entity that exists for multiple benefits. Members that have these team conceptions might be more responsive to charismatic leadership that emphasizes vision and emotion. In contrast, less collectivist ic team members may hold a task-focused conception of teams and thus be less receptive to non-taskoriented leader behavior. Similarly, another stream of research has demonstrated that teams high in collectivism behave more cooperatively than individualistic teams (Cox, Lobel, and McLeod, 1991) and that collectivistic groups have fewer conflicts, more cooperating tactics, and less competitive tactics than individualistic teams (Oetzel, 1998). This may be because of the individualistic tendency to have an underlying definition of a team as a task-oriented entity, focused on a specific activity, with formal roles and deliverables. When teams are defined as such, team members are likely to be highly concerned with performance and behave so as to maximize the accomplishment of specific objectives.