Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Appliquées à la Gestion

Multicultural teams are seen by many companies as the best way to accomplish highly global tasks. But they are confronted to the "diversity - consensus dilemma" : team leaders have to maintain and valorize identity while also reaching consensus. The concept of "loosely coupled systems" represents a theoretical framework for this dilemma that has insufficiently been confronted to field studies of multicultural teams. This paper presents the case study of a design team. The work and interaction processes of the team are confronted to the theroetical grid of loosely coupled systems. The paper concludes on insights for the understanding of team interaction processes, as well as for the mananement of multicultural teams.