"Critical" situations in multicultural teams: The role of emotions

Book excerpt: Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: Interest in emotions within organisation increased in the last years. However, research in this field is scarce. In the discussion about emotions in organisation the increasing number of multicultural teams is adding an additional variable: culture , making research even more complicate. Practitioners report that where culture meets conflicts accompanied by negative emotions such as anger occur. However, also positive emotions like happiness may occur, having a positive influence on motivation and enhance cohesion, what may be considered as benefit in multicultural teams. Although anger as well happiness are considered as universally experienced emotion, there is some evidence that the causes, expression, and the behaviour which follows anger and happiness are culturally influenced. In multicultural teams the knowledge about the antecedents of these two emotions and the following behaviour seems to be especially important as on one hand misunderstandings and conflict connected with anger, may have serious social consequences reducing performance or even resulting in contra productive behaviour threatening the organisation, and on the other hand experience of success and good communication, enhancing team collaboration, seems to be connected with happiness. This thesis aims to contribute to a better understanding with regards the culturally-influenced antecedents of the two emotions anger and happiness as well as about the resulting behavioural consequences in multicultural team settings. The two research questions guiding this work are: 1. In which multicultural team situations do the emotions anger and happiness arise? 2. Which are the antecedents, in team settings, of the two emotions and which is the resulting behaviour respectively consequences that follows? Ahead, the Theoretical Part should provide the reader a basic introduction about emotions and the connected relevant factors like cognition, sociality and culture with regard to the research questions. Offering a working definition of culture and emotion, the attempt to illustrate the role of emotion in multicultural team settings as well the discussion about the discrepancy of expectation and of expression regarding emotions throughout cultures, should make the reader more sensible about a) the possible detected differences in antecedents and behavioural consequences and b) their impact in multicultural teams. In Chapter One a discussion about [...]