Bloomberg Businessweek

The organization that brings together business minds, particularly those of interns, develops their company ideas, and advances their careers is known as the Bloomberg Businessweek B-school Connection Program. As a result, the focus of this study will not only be on this specific organization but also on how it may be managed effectively and make significant contributions on a worldwide scale.

By improving communication and language expression, the cross-cultural virtual team can be recommended most effectively. The most important factor is the effectiveness of the communication (Mayer, M. & Bello, 2012). Each member of a team must work together to grasp the direction the debate is going in order to avoid being misled; this can be made possible through asking questions. Another common problem in the virtual cross-cultural group is the information gap. Therefore, it will require every individual to be on the similar wavelength of information. The solution to this problem is by adopting the “Groupware” software using multiple-user technology. It allows online sharing of essential materials, chats for better understanding.

Working styles and varied approaches in a team with mixed cross-cultural is a challenge and require proper handling. There are different approaches to work depending on people’s culture, like those working independent of others and vice versa (Gunkel, Schlaegel, & Taras, 2016). In such cases, there is need to understand cultural variations and device mechanisms that will help handle these differences in a better manner. In situations where there is a dominant team with homogeneous culture; this may result in a problem of influential dominancy that could swing some decisions towards them, hence need to solve such outcome in the team.

Legal and regulatory factors the team should consider as associated with intern employment in the United States (US) among them is keenness not to violate interns basing on age (Elizabeth, 2017). The federal law protects any violation of the interns especially those less than 18 years, but once beyond 18 years, the federal has no child labor rules on them. These federal actions should not, however, give employers the right to discriminate old interns illegally. The employer also needs to know the national rules on payment especially overtime pay for the interns. However, this may differ between private and the public sectors.

The difference between the leading (US) based virtual cross-cultural group, and global virtual cross-cultural one is that the US group has multiple time difference zones. Thus communication and responses are much considered from the respective parties from different geographical regions (Anawati & Craig, 2006). In the global team, the persons in organization work together; and there is a high degree of emotional connection existing among members. Through such interaction, there is the built of trust among members.

There are different activities hosted on the interns from different regions to celebrate their various diversities. They include language sharing, where interns from different parts of the continent who don’t speak American language need to be taught some American vocabularies and different body languages in communication (Sacco, 2014). The other way can be through sharing the food variety and even cooking styles. Sharing of their favorable recipe will make them diversify on different cultures they had never known. Lastly, through sporting, there is an exchange of some ideas, they can share the knowledge they never had in some games like when playing baseball games during summer, they can educate them on rules and regulation of the game.

The organization on board of intern can introduce them to US culture in a way to make them fit the lifestyle of US differently. These include training that can aim at equipping interns with adequate knowledge, example, the skills of human resource managers should thoroughly assess workforce and all their needs and obtain different skills from those outside (Chebium, 2015). Through this, many opportunities are strengthened especially on culture effectiveness within the companies; an example is when Americans are sent to work in Mexico or Brazil while she brings the overseas workers from say Spain.

The benefit of international internship to both interns and organization is that they give practical experience in chosen fields and provide network opportunities to customers in the real world and among colleagues (Kaplan, 2000). To the interns, such programs create chances for them to get hired in their field. More hiring takes place internally because of factors like the institutional culture that could be costly for external recruitment.

References

Anawati, D., & Craig, A. (2006). Behavioral adaptation within cross-cultural virtual teams. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 49(1), 44–56. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPC.2006.870459

Chebium, R. (2015). How to Create an Effective Cross-Cultural Training Program. http://www.shrm.org/publications/hrmagazine/editorialcontent/2015/010215/pages/010215-cross-cultural-training.aspx

Elizabeth, H. (2017). Let’s Get Legal Guidelines for Paid or Unpaid Internships - Fastweb. Retrieved from https://www.fastweb.com/career-planning/articles/let-s-get-legal-guidelines-for-paid-or-unpaid-internships

Gunkel, M., Schlaegel, C., & Taras, V. (2016). Cultural values, emotional intelligence, and conflict handling styles: A global study. Journal of World Business. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2016.02.001

Kaplan, R. (2000). Legal Issues Surrounding Internships, 322–344. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-8629-8.ch013

Mayer, M. & Bello, Y. (2012). Leading Cross Cultural Teams in Today’s Global Marketplace. Retrieved from https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/cross-cultural-teams-global-marketplace-6304

Sacco, S. J. (2014). International internships are increasingly valued by employers - ICEF Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08975930.2014.925748?src=recsys&journalCode=wtib20