The Real Reason Your Multinational Team Has Trouble Communicating

In multinational businesses, team members often have to communicate information to colleagues based across the globe. But for a host of reasons, that information sharing often doesn’t happen as effectively as it should. Wharton management professor Martine Haas was curious about precisely which issues were most responsible for impairing that vital communication, and what could be done to improve it. She and Jonathon Cummings of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business revealed what they learned in their paper, “Barriers to Knowledge Seeking within MNC Teams: Which Differences Matter Most?”, published in the Journal of International Business Studies. In this interview with Knowledge@Wharton, Haas details their findings, and talks about what they mean for managers in the global economy.