Teamwork Across Cultures: Local Employees’ Perceptions of Foreign Operational Co-workers in Malaysian Hotels

Malaysian hotels increasingly depend on foreign employees to support their daily operations, demanding local employees to work into multicultural environment. Despite this normal multicultural hotel settings, research on how local employees perceive working together with foreign co-workers and whether these perceptions shape teamwork performance is currently very limited. Thus, this study utilized Social Identity Theory (SIT) aims to examines the four aspects of foreign co-workers’ work behaviour namely professionalism, teamwork orientation, communication effectiveness, and work attitude; as well as their influence on teamwork performance among local operational hotel employees. A quantitative, cross-sectional design was employed, with data collected through a self-administered questionnaire from 142 Malaysian employees who work directly with foreign operational co-workers in operational departments for at least three months in their current hotel across the Klang Valley. The data were collected using judgemental sampling and analysed using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, and diagnostic checking prior to multiple linear regression analysis. Overall, respondents viewed their foreign co-workers positively across all four behavioural dimensions, with both teamwork orientation and work attitude recorded the highest mean score (M=4.02). All four behavioural predictors have moderate to strong correlation (r=.622 to .677) with team work performance. However, when taken together, only teamwork orientation (β = .295, t = 3.098, p = .002), and communication effectiveness (β = .279, t = 2.989, p = .003) were statistically significant; where teamwork orientation reported as the strongest significant predictor, followed by communication effectiveness. In contrast, professionalism and work attitude did not significantly predicts the teamwork performance. These findings suggest that effective multicultural teamwork in hotel operations depends less on general positive impressions of foreign employees and more on behaviours that directly support cooperation and communication. The study extends understanding of local–foreign employee relations in hospitality and offers practical guidance for hotels seeking to strengthen teamwork through targeted communication, integration, and team-based training practices.

Foreign operational employees, teamwork performance, teamwork orientation

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