IBM’s Multicultural Multinational Teams Essay

When someone thinks of a well-established and traditional company, they may think of IBM. IBM is well known for its written and unwritten rules. IBM likes to focus on individual promotions and achievement and the expectation of lifetime service at the company. But times have changed in this day and age. The company’s new focus is on teamwork. The total amount of hours that IBM devoted to management time for team projects is a great idea and has shown that teams can improve a company for the better. Their human resources department did an excellent job in dedicating those hours to team projects. The teams of employees that IBM sends overseas will bring them new clients but will also widens the opportunity for new clients through helping other companies or organizations. By developing teams, IBM will be able to prepare an extremely strong and varied team. The teams can coup-up with any culture and get the job done successfully. By developing teams IBM will get a leader or problem solver, the team members can work together globally and become sensitive to another culture and their traditions or customs, it will build trust and understanding amongst the team members to complete a project, and any experience team can support a team that does not have a leader or someone who is an affective communicator. Working in teams will benefit both IBM and the employees. IBM’s culture had to change to keep up with society and the changing times. Not only will that but team focused companies have skills variety, diversity, a common purpose and goal. So, essentially companies that are focus on teams rather than individual work are better companies. There are five stages to forming an effective team. These developing steps are forming, storming, and norming, performing and adjourning. The first stage, forming is when the team members will get together to meet each other professionally and hear about goals and any information that the managers have given to help them. The second stage, storming is the adverse phases of the group stop progress. This phase is when members of the group may become unwilling to abide by the rules and regulations that where agreed upon during the forming stage. In some instances, management may have to set in and resolve the issue. The third stage is norming, in which disagreements are resolved Rules, regulations and leadership may have been changed to better suit the group. During this phase more constructive work and assignment completion may happen. The fourth stage is performing; this is when the group is at the top of performance.