Abstract:

Contemporary organisations which operate in a difficult, complex, and fast-changing environment increasingly appreciate the role and importance of leadership. Leadership supports shaping the future of a company and its development strategy as well as directing the attention of an organisation, its employees and managers to the most important issues. The ability to lead means, among other things, effectively motivating employees to achieve a company’s mission and goals, which is a fundamental factor in its success. Leadership has been analysed by researchers and practitioners for years, and one of their findings is that today’s dynamic development of cross-cultural interactions requires leadership understood as the ability to inspire people and release their energy to act, to introduce changes, and to effectively build competitive advantage of a company – especially if it operates in the international context – on turbulent global markets. Multiculturalism requires leaders who know a lot about the cultures their employees come from, who pay attention to them and motivate them to make an effort to realise the company’s vision. The study described in this article is devoted to leadership in managing multicultural teams. The interviews on which the study is based were conducted in 2021 and 2022 with the Portuguese managers and their results were compared with the results of the interviews conducted with the Polish managers in 2020. In order to obtain a broader picture of the analysed issue, the article also describes the results of an in-depth group interview with six managers from six European countries. The results of the individual and group in-depth interviews as well as the analysis of the subject literature allow the author to conclude that leadership in managing teams in a culturally diverse work environment is a particularly important and current topic which implies a number of challenges for the coming years.