Leadership Style & Challenges of MCT Management : Case Study- Swedish Construction MNC

Abstract: Ongoing globalization in business world has led to increase diversity of workforce.Organizations are relying more and more on people coming from all over the world withdifferent backgrounds, nationalities, culture, race etc. Operating in such multiculturalenvironment has forced MNCs to recognize the importance of retaining highly qualified leadersto manage multicultural employees and more specifically to pay attention on the differentchallenges that they might face. In such multicultural environment, it’s important that managershave the required competencies to manage people from culturally diverse background.The purpose of this study is to investigate in detail the most suitable leadership styles toovercome the challenges of multicultural project teams so that organizations can gaincompetitive advantage over others. To find the most suitable leadership styles, firstly weinvestigated based on literature the most important challenges and issues that both projectmanagers and multicultural teams face. Secondly, we defined the project managers who areable to identify and overcome the challenges of multicultural teams. Thirdly, we analysed theleadership style and competencies of project managers who are aware of the differentchallenges of MCT to find out the most suitable and common leadership style in the studiedindustry. The research is a qualitative single case study focusing on one construction MNCnamely ‘Skanska’ in Sweden.In this study, we found three common leadership styles presented among project managersnamely; mix of servant plus transformational leadership, mix of transformational andtransactional leadership, and lastly transformational leadership style. Findings from the studyshow that mix of servant and transactional leadership is the most suitable leadership style formanaging multicultural project teams in construction industry, while it seems also thattransformational leadership style is being the most common style as every project leaderpossess some traits of it.