Abstract:

Leading teams that include team-members from different organization cultures requires insight and knowledge of cultural patterns and preferences. An important part of modern organization culture is accepting employees´ preferences on the individualism-collectivism scale. As earlier research has shown, such preferences by individuals is usually guided by the cultural environment they come from. As for Scandinavia, in terms of leadership, e.g. Finland tends to be described as a rather straightforward ( hierarchical) organisation culture, where the leader makes the final decision, and bears the responsibility. We suggest the same is true for Estonia. Sweden, in contrast, is rather known for its “consensus” culture, which entails rather group decisions that are reached through lengthy discussions.

In our research we describe some occurrences of both working styles based on our experience of leading cross-national Scandinavian-Baltic-Fenno-Ugric teams in different international projects during the six past years and participating for about 9-10 years.

We analyse some historic reasons why collectivism vs individualism may have become the main tenure in Estonian and Swedish organization cultures and cultural pattern preferences respectively. We also take a look at the pros and cons of both organization styles, and propose a model for inclusive understanding in teams that entail participants from both cultures and organization-style backgrounds.

Keywords:

Leadership, International Cooperation, Organisation culture, cultural behavioural styles, individualism, collectivism, international teams.