Cross-cultural management and Diversity in Team Sports

If all the players in a team do not speak the same language - can they play together?

Do players in a team need to have a common language and culture? Is it enough to just learn the vocabulary of the game or does one need to have a deeper knowledge of the culture where one lives? 

Only six of the forty member 2008 squad of UK's top tier Chelsea Football Club (owned by a Russian) are ethnic English. This situation is nowadays commonplace in the national teams of many countries in different sports.

How Does Communication Affect Sports Performance in Multicultural Teams

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Does diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds affect sports performance in multicultural teams? 

Some basic requirements for communication success in diverse teams seem to be:

• Everyone understands verbal communications, especially those of the coach
• All players have a clear picture of their own role and how it fits with the big picture
• Players and coach have a common language
• Cultural 'mindsets' and mentalities do not conflict too much with the above

How does communication and language issues affect sports performance in the multicultural Trentino Volley team with six Italians and six non-Italians? 

Cross-Cultural blogger Elizabeth Abbott talks about this issue in her blog 

cross-cultural moments: East meets West

Non-Verbal Communication in Multicultural Sports Teams

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Words and how we say them are vital, so is non-verbal communication. However, words once said can be added to, qualified or explained. But they can never be retracted. How others get the message is not often easy to predict.

In conveying our messages, one thing which is often overlooked is: 

• the norms people are used to when decoding the non-verbal cues in their own culture.

Some forms of non-verbal communications are called kinesics and they could be grouped as

• body language
• gestures
• eye-contact - length and manner of eye-contact

Proxemics is the other type of non-verbal communication and it deals with how cultures view personal space and the relationship of people as regards to space.

There are also other areas such as inflection, intonation, how one raises one's voice in what situation and what it means etc.

National Stereotypes in Team Communication

People usually (rather often than not) use national or cultural stereotypes about other cultures. Germans are like this or the Italians behave like this, the Japanese don't do this, and so on. 

Though they may, at surface level seem to give a good working tool, they can be very misleading. If you start using the three tips about the English way of communicating you got from a consultant with experience from the banking industry in London and start applying it to everyone from the UK, you are surely in for trouble. 

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So, avoid national stereotypes!

The best advice is: 

1. Discuss the ways of communicating used regularly and how it is working
2. How each member understands the communication
3. Expects to be understood and 
4. Is used to communicating and interpreting

Maximum Number of Foreign Players in a Team

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Is there a limit to the number of foreign players in a sports team that will not prevent a team from performing successfully and actually be an advantage?

Quite often we see national teams with hardly any indigenous player. This is very common in high profile sports such as the soccer team of USA with all foreign born players. 

15% of NBA (National Basketball Association, USA) players are of foreign origin. They are from Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Lithuania, Serbia, Spain, Turkey. The NBA sees the situation as an opportunity for reverse marketing and spreading its influence in those countries. 

So, the answer is, it depends.

Here's an interesting article on diversity in a sports team.

Teaching Children How to Control their Alcohol Drinking and Addiction!

Should children be taught how to drink alcohol wisely?

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Researchers cannot agree on whether parents showing their children to use alcohol responsible succeed. Research on how parent-enabled binge drinking shapes their children's alcohol behaviour is very contradictory.

The Yes camp has a lot of supportive research for the claim that parents teaching kids the delicate art of 'responsible' drinking is a blessing for them. But the critics of the yes camp and the no camp have equally strong arsenal to counter the main arguments. 

A survey of 6,245 American teens, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2004, discovered that adults play a very important role in teen drinking although in different ways. Teens attending a party with alcohol supplied by a parent were twice as likely to binge drink and twice as likely to become regular drinkers. But teens drinking occasionally with their parents were only one-third as likely to binge and half as likely to become regular drinkers.

Parents usually have two approaches to alcohol usage training:

1. Small amounts of alcohol drinking under parent supervision
2. Zero tolerance - no alcohol drinking under any circumstances!

Law enforcement in the USA and some Asian countries takes the second approach while most other countries take the first approach.

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Many parents believe that letting their teenagers have alcohol at home makes them responsible drinkers. Research findings (Vorst et al. 2010) show that alcohol permissive parents may have good intentions, but the results may not be what they desire. In a study of 428 Dutch families, researchers discovered that the more their parents allowed them to drink at home, the more they drank outside. Teenagers who drank under parental supervision had a higher risk of getting addiction and alcohol related problems. 

One of the central problems here is not the alcohol itself but the mixed message parents give to the teens while drinking. Children want and expect parents to be parents and not drinking buddies.

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Many governments worry about their younger citizens drinking. The UK government is seriously concerned about young people in the UK consuming alcohol irresponsibly.

UK Government Attitude to Youth Alcohol Consumption

According to BBC reports, the government aim is to reduce drinking and drunken behaviour in public. 

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UK Government statistics show that the number of 11 to 15-year-olds drinking regularly had fallen from 28% in 2001 to 21% in 2006. However, average consumption by young people who drank had nearly doubled from 5.3 units in 1990 to 11.4 units in 2006. In this UK government programme, teenagers who habitually carry and consume alcohol in public have to follow anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos) and acceptable behaviour contracts. 

Parents will get guidelines on how much alcohol their children can safely consume, in a bid to encourage teenagers to drink more responsibly. UK Parents who fail to get their children to stop abusing alcohol would be forced to attend parenting courses or face prosecution.

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US Government Attitude to Youth Alcohol Consumption

The US approach is very different. According to the US government’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health, “Nearly 7.2 million (19 percent of all youths) were binge drinkers” – that is, having five or more drinks at least once a month. 

The United States is the only Western nation to make drinking illegal until people turn 21, though people can enlist in the army, handle weapons of mass destruction and get killed or kill others in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

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In a US survey of teen drinkers, two thirds of those sampled said they got alcohol from family members or friends. Underage drinkers consume 26% of alcohol in Ohio. That's only the second-highest rate of underage consumption in the nation.

Chinese Government Attitude to Alcohol Consumption of Minors

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The Chinese government has also banned alcohol sales to minors. They blame that permissive attitudes among parents and teachers have worsened a growing problem with under-age drinking. A quarter of middle-school pupils and up to 80 per cent of high school pupils say they drink alcohol, according to Sun Yunxiao, of the China Youth Research Centre, in a recent article in People's Daily.

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Youngsters in India still lag far behind in this. India is 150th among 184 countries in WHO's Global Status Report on Alcohol 2004. Uganda tops this list at 19.5 litres and India a meagre 0,8 litres per head. Figures and reports are not available from Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan.

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Marketing experts argue that advertisements do not target those below the legal drinking age. Research in the US shows that when a total ban on advertising was introduced, consumption levels did not change.

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So what can governments do to tackle irresponsible underage drinking? Do you have any suggestions?

Additional resources: 

• Donovan, John E. Adolescent Alcohol Initiation: A review of Psychological Risk Factors. Journal of Adolescent Health 2004; 35:529.e7-529.e18 accessed from http://www.prevention.psu.edu/documents/donovan_jah_article.pdf
• van der Vorst, H., Engels, R. C. M. E., & Burk, W. J. Do parents and best friends influence the normative increase in adolescents' alcohol use at home and outside the home? Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 2010; 71 (1): 105-114

Where in the World are Women not Allowed!

Are there many places in the world today where women are not allowed to enter? 

Stories and Images of Taleban men enforcing their strictness on women are familiar to all. What about the EU in 2008? 

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Are there still Gentlemen's clubs in the UK, where women are not allowed, as members?

Yes, White's Club is an example of such a place. There are female dancers and other professionals there but no female members.

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The Only Woman Who Has Been on Mount Athos, Greece

One place strictly banning women is Mount Athos, Greece. This ban on women extends also to females of animal species and dates back to a decree banning women entering the Eastern Orthodox monastic peninsula issued by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Monomachos in 1060. Four Moldovan women trying to sneak into the EU recently tested this ban. News reports say that they were forgiven and not imprisoned. 

55 years ago, Times reported how Aliki Diplarakou, Miss Greece of 1929, had dressed up in men's clothes and smuggled herself into the monks' sanctuary on Mount Athos to see with her own eyes what a place without women would be like. 

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Professions Where Women Are Not Allowed

The priesthood in the Catholic Church is still off-limits for women. The Vatican teaches that women cannot be ordained and has barred further discussion of the issue. 

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Women are also not allowed to elect a Pope. There is no legal ban but the only people allowed to take part are Cardinals below the age of 80, and since Canon Law forbids women from being ordained as priest, there are no women Cardinals and thus no woman can elect a Pope.

Men’s football, that bastion of male machismo is officially off-limits for women too.  A Mexican woman footballer was banned from playing for a professional men's club according to a FIFA Football's world governing body ruling. 

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The US Armed Services does not allow women in full combat roles. There has been some attempts to relax this ban but they have not been successful. "Women in the infantry: Forget about it!" is still the current line in the US Armed Forces. The official website sums it up as:

“Women have served in the United States Army since 1775. They nursed the ill and wounded, laundered and mended clothing, and cooked for the troops in camp on campaign; services that did not exist among the uniformed personnel within the Army until the 20th Century.”

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Women are not allowed to ride bicycles in the North Korean capital city of Pyonyang. According to the Hub of North Korea News Kim Jong Il saw a woman riding a bicycle wearing pants in 1996. Kim Jong Il then ordered:

“It looks horrible. Do not let women ride bicycles.”

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p.s. Women are allowed to ride bicycles in North Korea from August 2012 in a change of policy announcement.

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In Malawi, women were not allowed by law to wear trousers from 1965 to 1994, under President Kamuzu Banda's rule.

In Saudi Arabia, the highest religious authorities have issued Fatwas (bans) against women working in 'mixed' environments e.g. shop checkouts. Many employers still defy this ban and the Saudi Labour Ministry has reinstated women fired from their jobs.

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Women in Saudi Arabia are not supposed to drive motor vehicles. There is no law against this, but it is a social convention against Saudi women though Beduin women in the desert areas do drive around.

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