Biblical Multicultural Teams

by Sheryl Takagi Silzer

Biblical Multicultural Teams speaks to the heart of cultural misunderstanding- our childhood upbringing. Sheryl Takagi Silzer is able in this work to provide both an honest look at her own cross-cultural experience and an astute academic understanding of cross-cultural communication. We all work and function in a multicultural world. The advice and wisdom in Biblical Multicultural Teams will thus enable you to take a hard look at assumptions and attitudes found in your team and to work on submitting them to biblical standards of interaction.

180 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 9, 2011

Reviews

[Nancy DeValve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mrs Silzer presents the cultural grid-group theory that has been made popular by Sherwood Ligenfelter and Mary Douglas. Since the author refers to them often and uses their thinking, it would probably be better to just read their books. However, Mrs Silzer does present this theory from a slightly different vantage point in that she has you remember your childhood home, then takes you through the purposes of each room and shows how different cultures view the uses of the rooms differently. For example, the bedroom is for sleep and she shows how in some cultures people have a very set time for going to bed and getting up, each family member has their own bed, and people have expectations as to noise levels during sleep times. But other cultures are able to sleep wherever and at any time, beds are shared among family members, and people can seemingly sleep through anything. She also looks at eating, working, resting, and cleaning. I found the book helpful, but was a little disappointed in that she didn't really talk about teams until the last chapter. Still there was plenty in the book that teams could apply to learning to understand each other and to live and work together.

[Filip Sekkelsten · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many good topics, but exceedingly repetitive. It almost seems as the book is a fleshed-out version of a long bullet-point list.

[Allen Jr. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've worked with cross-cultural and multicultural teams for more than 10 years, so I was instantly attracted to the title of this book. While the author brings a great deal of personal experience and research to her intended task, I unfortunately found this book disappointing.

Despite the reference to teams, there is very little material presented about how to incorporate the author's presentation of various cultural differences and biases into a group context. There are many paradigms out there for how to describe the spectrum of cultural perspectives and experiences in the world, and the one used here is fine, but I didn't find it particularly fresh or insightful.

Much of the presentation felt very repetitive, with the author's common mantra circling around a general idea of how exhibiting one's culture is most likely distorting the image of God that ideally each individual should portray. I found little to encourage me about the possibilities for redeeming one's expression of personality and culture, and rather felt like the biases we all have are almost completely negative and fraught with pitfalls and shortcomings.

If you're interested in uncovering a paradigm and some categories for use in describing cultural variations, the first few chapters are okay, but the majority of the book (looking at how various aspects of one's home floorplan and childhood experiences shape cultural biases) was ultimately not useful to me in supporting teams in unity and effectiveness.