The use of culturally diverse sales teams is an increasingly common situation in today's world; especially as the world continues to become a global village. Leveraging the cultural diversity and experiences of these team members can be a source of performance improvement that can ultimately reflect a competitive advantage in the corporate marketplace. As Symons and Stenzel (2007) rightly put it, “culturally diverse teams are more likely to engage in innovative and outside-the-box thinking, given their different life experiences in diverse social environments.” Another clue suggesting that multicultural teams tend to be a source of competitive advantage in business can be found in the article by Di Stefano and Maznevski (2000), where they assert that "multicultural teams have enormous wealth of material with which to create innovative approaches to complex organizational challenges. They further assert that “businesses today cannot thrive without the creative value delivered by high-performing global teams.” Several factors are important for a culturally diverse sales team to thrive and realize its vast potential. Di Stefano and Maznevski (2000) assert that there are three imperative steps to achieving multicultural team success: namely, mapping the team; where team members must clearly understand their cultural differences in the way they work and perceive success. This is often led by the team leader. Next, the team must build bridges, that is, communicate with each other, taking into account their cultural differences. Finally, the team must integrate, that is, bring these differences together and leverage them to succeed. Symons and Stenzel (2007) also tell us that for a multicultural team ...... middle of paper ...... &AN=25012463&site=ehost-live . Accessed: March 21, 2012 Lee, MR (2009) “E-ethical leadership for virtual project teams”, International Journal of Project Management, 27 (5), pp.456-463. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijproman.2008.05.012http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/10.1016/j.ijproman.2008.05.012. Accessed March 21, 2012. Brett, J., Behfar, K. and Kern, M. (2006) “Managing multicultural teams”, Harvard Business Review, 84 (11), pp.84-91, Business Source Premier [online ].http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=22671287&site=ehost-live. Accessed March 21, 2012. Di Stefano, JJ & Maznevski, ML (2000) “Creating Value with Diverse Teams in Global Management”, Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 45 – 63, http://www.genderdiversity.cgiar.org/publications/creatingvaluewithdiverseteams.pdf. Accessed: March 23, 2012.