Fabienne Munch (Arnould)

Composition of the Jury

Abstract

Multicultural project teams all too often find themselves failing or underperforming in their missions. The objective of this dissertation is to demonstrate how the application of design processes and concepts can provide a better understanding of situations involving deadlocks and misunderstandings, in order to inform the management of international and multicultural project teams. This research draws on the design-driven process and reflection-in-action, applying them to intercultural management. The design-driven process, by alternating between divergence and convergence phases throughout the project, treats every “input” as a solution in the making and allows for the diversity of perspectives—which is often a source of obstacles or even intercultural conflicts—to be placed at the heart of the realm of possibilities within an iterative process of progress. Reflection-in-action is a quest for comprehensive experimentation, whose objective is to reframe a problem whenever it is not well defined. When mastered by managers, reflection-in-action enables them to “engage with the situation,” observe phenomena, and maintain a progressive problematization that evolves over the course of the project. Its reflexive characteristics make it particularly well-suited to situations of deadlock or communication barriers encountered by multicultural teams. This dissertation is based on three empirical articles, all of which employ a qualitative methodology and draw on two field case studies, one in the United States and the other in Canada. An abductive process was used to compare the empirical results with organizational and management theory. This dissertation makes three key contributions to the field of management: First, grouping “reflection in action” and the design process under the umbrella of “design in action” provides a flexible framework that allows for the integration of variables from the organizational context, the sharing and local adaptation of standard communication tools—both synchronous and asynchronous—and the leveraging of accumulated expertise. Second, the “design in action” process, capitalizing on the fluidity of new knowledge creation and its dissemination, makes it possible to identify bottlenecks and view cultural differences as integral to the work at hand, thereby better managing the balance of power among the team’s various cultural subgroups through a nuanced analysis of situations achieved by decoding perceptions. Third, the research shows that managers can acquire intercultural competencies specific to “intersecting managers,” rooted in the gradual development of new frameworks for framing situations, through which they can establish a shared identity and context and work with their teams toward faster decisions and a reduced risk of error. Keywords: multicultural teams – intercultural management – design process – reflection in action

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