Conclusion and limitations

It is difficult to say which team is better, monocultural or multicultural, because it seems to be limited to think that communication and management conflicts in multicultural teams may be caused only by cultural differences and the level of non-native language proficiency. While analyzing a team work and leadership it might be important to pay attention to team context and individual pecularities as well as language usage. Furthermore, it is worth thinking about how to judge a team’s success: whether maintaining good relationship with team members regardless the result, focusing on the result with careless attention to the atmosphere in the team or both.

Limitations of scope and methods of data collection allowed to provide only a brief outlook on the interaction and management style of 2 multicultural teams in a particular educational setting (the University of Warwick is famous for its students’ diversity with 90% of MSc ICBP students being from outside the UK). Moreover, subjectivity factor should be taken into consideration because the researcher was a member of both teams. That is why, the interpretation of the same group work may vary among team members. Nevertheless, the discussed issues of multicultural teams’ way of communication and management, in particular at a university with cross-cultural diversity of professors, staff and students, may be suggested as an area of further research: the recognized problems in communication among students in multicultural teams may stress the particular importance of youngsters’ intercultural training.

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