ASPECTS OF THE ASSOCIATION OF EFFECTIVE TEAM RELATED VARIABLES IN THE MANAGEMENT OF INTERCULTURAL WORK TEAMS IN MULTINATIONAL COMPANIES

Various phenomena generated by the new context of globalization have focused our research interest towards studying in what ways management of Intercultural Work teams (IWT) could and should contribute to the increase of their performance at work. Despite the recognition of the fact that many MNCs fail in the management of IWTs, there is still a significant knowledge gap about their non-functionalities. Managerial literature "blames" national and organizational culture differences for the failure of this process. This is because each member brings his own style of work, with his own way of ensuring effective cooperation, making difficult to identify a clear recipe of a team organization and management in intercultural context. Teamwork, managing work teams made the subject of numerous researchers from many fields, denoting so difficult exercise in practice. However, we have identified high performance IWTs whose members are from different countries. Therefore, we assume that their management identified and used methods and instruments able to ensuring IWT performance. If we look at international research, intercultural teams management models have a reductionist and not holistic approach, namely stochastic in terms of selection of specific cultural dimensions cultural models specific to the interest of the researcher. In contrast, in Romania, intercultural management and intercultural management teams performance is less studied. The research presented below is set up to be a part of a pilot study, an exploratory research of how intercultural management assigned dimensions are directly related to the concept of EIA performance dimensions assigned. Our assumption for the empirical research is the following: work team performance (effective, efficient, with a high degree of satisfaction of its members) is the result of application performance management in the context of a particular style of interaction specific team. Because the dependent variables were nominal variables, and due to small size of the sample (10 managers and 33 employees ), we applied "non-parametrical tests considered the only relevant tests" (Popa, 2008:214). The research is "degree of association", the independent and dependent variables of the same type. One more reason to choose this model of research is that we cannot claim a causal relationship, but the combination of variables that represent characteristics of a high performance team and not performance indicators. We will not venture to make judgments of causality based on done statistical tests.