Intercultural Communication Between Caucasian Unitedstatesians and Salvadorians: Implications for Team Dynamics

With the advent of an increasingly interdependent world, organizations and businesses around the globe either purposefully seek or have no other option than to integrate work teams with members from ethnically and culturally diverse backgrounds. This is true in government, the corporate world, education, and the social service fields and community development endeavors, among others. However, multicultural teams most frequently experience frustrations and, at times, significant impasses in their performance. This phenomenon is directly related to differences in values and beliefs towards work, as well as to habits and expectations regarding teamwork (Bennett and Stewart, 1991; Cox, 1994; Donnellon, 1996; Hofstede, 2001). Consequently, a careful exploration of intercultural issues relating to work and teams is imperative in order to shed light on how to better equip working groups facing this reality at the dawn of the Twenty -First Century