Abstract:

For some years now, business environments have been labeled as VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) environments as they change their conditions and increase the stress level of business activities. To achieve business goals in such environments, ensuring growth and development, global teams propose, achieve, accept, and approve critical decisions for which they need endurance, determination, resilience, and motivation. There is recent research on the effects of employee satisfaction on the success of the company (Alkurdi et al., 2020). Research also mentions that bias can affect decision-making processes, triggering reduced motivation, talented people quitting and leaving, and lower financial results.
Team management in multinational companies depends on the uniqueness of the team. The impetus for this type of team is based on the need to ensure business growth and the search for development and balance between multiple, sometimes simultaneous, decision-making (Blanchard et al., 1993).
There is much recent research that examines the relationship between the diversity of work teams involved in decision-making processes and the degree of employee work engagement (Fan et al., 2023; Du et al., 2021; Tian et al., 2021). Diversity in MNE work teams can be addressed by differences in people's gender, age or generation, formal education, nationality or primary culture, and geographical location of the unit or team.
There is also research that analyzes the relationship between the diversity of the work teams involved in decision-making processes and the leadership styles adopted by the people of these teams (Adamska-Chudzińska, 2020; Black & Mesia, 2020).
This paper analyses the relationship between the diversity of the work teams of a multinational company involved in decision-making processes, the degree of work engagement, and the situational leadership styles adopted by employees. Specifically, the paper presents the relationships between five elements or factors associated with the diversity of work teams (gender, age, education, nationality, geographical location) and several categories of work engagement and situational leadership styles.
A questionnaire has been developed based on the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale-9 (UWES-9) (Schaufeli et al., 2006) and the situational leadership styles (Hersey & Blanchard, 1988). The questionnaire was answered by more than 500 people working in different country divisions and international teams of a multinational company.
Based on the independent variables, multivariate analysis methodologies were applied to segment the subsamples (PLS-SEM, K-means cluster analysis). Subsequently, parametric and non-parametric techniques were applied to determine the existence of statistically significant differences between the subsamples (normality test, contrasts of mean differences, Levene's test, and test of independence).
The results point to the existence of some statistically significant differences in the level of work engagement and the predominant situational leadership styles
(1) in women and men;
(2) in people belonging to the Baby Boom, X, Y, and Z generations;
(3) in people with an electrical or electronic engineering background, another engineering background and a different university degree;
(4) in people who have a different nationality and have grown up in a different national culture than the culture of the work team where they work; and
(5) in people working on different continents.

Keywords:

Work engagement, Leadership styles, Multinational company, Team diversity, Educational diversity.