Us vs them dynamics in international teams emerge when geographic or cultural subgroups form and collaboration breaks down. This guide explains why global teams split along cultural lines, how to spot the warning signs early, and how cross-cultural training, intercultural workshops, and coaching and mentoring help leaders rebuild team cohesion in Barcelona and worldwide.
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Us vs Them in International Teams: Why It Happens and How to Stop It
When a global team quietly splits along geographic or cultural lines, the damage is gradual and almost invisible — until it isn’t. Here’s the structural reason it happens, and what leaders can do before it becomes entrenched.
The team had been working together for eight months. On paper, it was a high-performing global team — Boston, London, Tokyo — covering time zones, combining expertise, and producing good results. But when I spoke to team members individually, something else emerged.
The Boston group felt they were doing the “real” work — the strategy, the client relationships, the decisions that mattered. London felt competent but peripheral. Tokyo felt like they were regularly kept out of conversations that affected them, and had largely stopped trying to get into them.
None of this had been discussed openly. Nobody had decided it would be this way. It had simply accumulated — through meeting times that always favoured Boston, through credit that tended to stay on the Boston side of the collaboration, through an implicit sense, never stated, that the team had a centre and it wasn’t London or Tokyo. This is the us versus them dynamic. And it is one of the most damaging — and most preventable — sources of cultural friction in international organisations.
Why Global Teams Split Along Geographic Lines
Tsedal Neeley’s research on global team structure is clear on the mechanism: subgroups form along geographic lines when the structure of a team creates imbalance in perceived status or centrality. When one site has more members, when the team leader sits there, when the decision-making happens in that time zone — that site accrues informal power. The other sites feel it. And over time, they respond to it by pulling inward.
This is not primarily a cultural problem. It is a structural one. But cultural difference amplifies it significantly. In teams that include members from hierarchical cultures — where the perception that headquarters has the authority is culturally reinforced — the Tokyo team’s deference to Boston may feel natural and appropriate to Tokyo, while reading as passivity from Boston. In teams that include members from high-context cultures, the signals of marginalisation may be communicated indirectly and never received at all by the dominant group. The structural imbalance produces the split. The cultural difference makes it harder to name and harder to fix. For more on how egalitarian and hierarchical leadership interact with this dynamic, the companion articles cover the specific mechanisms in detail.
What It Looks Like on the Ground
I worked with a European company that had acquired a team in South-East Asia eighteen months earlier. The integration had gone well on paper — shared systems, aligned processes, regular video calls. But in practice, the two groups were operating as parallel organisations with a thin layer of coordination between them.
The European team had developed a habit of making decisions in informal conversations before the joint calls — then using the calls to communicate, not to decide. The South-East Asian team noticed. They stopped preparing for calls because nothing was actually going to happen in them. The European team noticed that the South-East Asian team seemed disengaged. They concluded the acquisition hadn’t worked culturally. They started routing more important work through the European team.
By the time I arrived, the South-East Asian team had essentially stopped trying to be part of the strategic conversation. They were executing, not contributing. Talented people who had been hired for their expertise were in operational roles below their capability — not because anyone had decided that, but because the structural dynamic had quietly sorted them there over eighteen months.
The us versus them dynamic had become the team’s actual structure. Undoing it took longer than creating it had.
The Warning Signs — Before It Becomes Entrenched
The signs of an emerging us versus them split are almost always visible before the split becomes fixed. Leaders who know what to look for can intervene before the damage compounds.
Parallel communication channels — a Slack channel, a WhatsApp group, a recurring call — that one geographic group uses to discuss things before or instead of joint forums. This is not always problematic, but when the parallel channel starts being used for strategic conversations that should happen in the full team, it signals that one group has stopped trusting the joint forum.
Credit disputes across sites — “we did that work” from one site, contested by another. This is almost never about the specific piece of work. It is about a deeper sense that contributions from one site are systematically less visible or less valued than contributions from another. The dispute is a symptom of the accumulation.
“They don’t understand our context” — said in either direction. When one site routinely explains the other’s behaviour by reference to their limited understanding of local conditions, it signals that the team has stopped operating as a single entity and started operating as two groups who happen to share a project. This language is a marker that the split is already real in people’s heads.
What Leaders Can Do
Chart where team members sit, where the leader is based, where decisions actually get made versus where they get ratified. If the map shows a clear centre and periphery, the structure is producing the dynamic — and the structure needs to change. Rotating which site chairs key meetings, which site leads initiatives, which site’s time zone gets the inconvenient hour — these are not symbolic gestures. They are the actual intervention.
The most common structural contribution to the us versus them dynamic is a dominant site pre-deciding before joint meetings and using those meetings to communicate rather than decide. Fixing this requires discipline and sometimes inconvenience. It means genuinely arriving at joint calls with an open question rather than a conclusion. But it changes what the joint call means — from a ratification ceremony that peripheral sites have learned to dismiss to an actual forum where contribution shapes outcomes.
Leaders who see an us versus them split emerging and say nothing are allowing it to consolidate. Naming it — not as an accusation but as a structural observation — opens the possibility of addressing it. “I want to talk about something I’ve been noticing in how we’re working. I think we might be operating more as two groups than as one team, and I want to understand why and what we can do about it.” This conversation, had early, is manageable. Had twelve months later, it is a much heavier lift.
For organisations managing this challenge at scale, cross-cultural leadership training provides leaders with the tools to both recognise and address the structural dynamics before they become fixed. And for individual leaders working through a specific team fracture, cross-cultural coaching, mentoring, and advisory provides the sustained support to navigate it.
Neeley, T. (2018). The Language of Global Success. Princeton University Press.
O’Leary, M. B. & Mortensen, M. (2010). Go (Con)Figure: Subgroups, imbalance, and isolates in geographically dispersed teams. Organization Science, 21(1), 115–131.
Meyer, E. (2014). The Culture Map. PublicAffairs.
Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G. J. & Minkov, M. (2010). Cultures and Organisations: Software of the Mind. McGraw-Hill.
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