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the overall firm and their parts in it, high capacity for self-control and willingness to

collaborate, and capacity to negotiate their differences.22 This requires constant

attention to the application of what Evans calls glue technology, or the management

development technology of integration, that is, management development practices

that have as a primary purpose the integration of the management and executiveworkforce of the firm and the building of the necessary competencies to use the

resulting networks in an effective way.23 Such global management development

programs are discussed more fully in Chapter 10 on training and executive

development.

Use and management of cross-border teams

Given the increasing complexity of organizations as described so far in this book andin this and the prior chapter, much of the work that needs to get done in a global

enterprise requires a high degree of interaction and interdependence between globally

dispersed organizations and between people in various, globally dispersed sections of

those organizations. This interaction is often relegated to a work group, or team.24

And, increasingly, these teams are made up of people from multiple and varying

organizations (or parts of the same organization), geographic locations, countries,

cultures, languages, ways of thinking and working, and time zones. Often they have

the characteristics of virtual teams, that is, they dont meet face to face and are not

co-located, they are widely geographically dispersed.

These cross-border teams come with many different names: global teams,

multinational, multicultural, transnational, trans-cultural, geographically distributed or

geographically dispersed, non-co-located or out-of-sight teams. All of these terms

refer to the phenomenon of people working together in teams, with common goals,

who are not physically located in the same place and often do not meet but rather

conduct their business via electronic means. In this book, such teams will generally

be referred to by the term cross-border teams, since this is the primary structure of

interest in this chapter and the phrasing that seems to be most commonly used.

These cross-border teams represent a dramatic change in the way managers function

and they present two major new challenges.25 Both of these challenges stem from

issues related to the physical separation of workers and managers made necessary by

globalization26 and possible by technology:27

The first challenge has to do with managing people you cant see. Managers must

make the transition from managing which activities get done when to managing

projects and their results.

The second managerial challenge is to redefine the role of management, itself, sincethe virtual nature of cross-border teams creates much uncertainty as to whether

managers still have a role to play in managing employees who are no longer present

in the same locale. In addition, these teams tend to be largely self-managing, with the

members working very interdependently via the internet.

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Organizational structure and design of MNEs 81