A New Concept of Working Environment Improvement Within Multicultural Teams

Multicultural team leaders under the conditions of globalisation process must understand that acquiring cultural awareness and diversity management skills is one of the premises for gaining competitive advantage and satisfying the employees´ need for social cohesion. The concept presented in this paper goes beyond standard understanding of what cultural diversity management means, as it is not perceived as a set of activities that a business as a whole should be responsible for, but encourage every leader to take responsibility for its own awareness firstly. After understanding that cross-cultural competence is a lifelong learning process it is possible to start recognising one’s own cultural mindset before attempting to recognise those of people from other cultures. At this point it is a right time to spread the experience amongst other team members or associates.