Cohesion challenges in a multicultural team in a hospital in Saudi Arabia

The researcher opted to use a descriptive qualitative design, and the preferred data collection method was individual face-to-face interviews to explore and understand the participants’ perceptions of the cohesion challenges that their multicultural nursing team experienced. The researcher led the interviews with the open-ended question, ‘What cohesion challenges does the multicultural nursing team of the cardiac centre experience, and what support should they get from management to overcome these challenges?’ and also used probing questions that guided the participants’ responses to enable a deeper understanding of their experiences. The interviews were audio-recorded as permitted by the participants. A thematic analysis was used to analyze the data.

The following six categories with subcategories emerged:-

• Excluded from communication due to language barriers
• Differences in practical experiences lead to alienation
• Nurse managers struggling to meet the new staff needs
• Advantages of multi-nationality nurses rejected
• Foreign nurses obliged to conform
• Nurse managers struggling to promote unified teamwork