Multicultural Work Teams

Fundamentals

The idea that cultural diversity can enhance team performance is based on cognitive resource theory. Cognitive resource theory suggests that diversity in a team can serve as an indicator of available knowledge and differing perspectives. The cultural diversity of multicultural work teams can indicate an important breadth of cultural knowledge, perspectives, cognitions, and languages needed for the team to meet its objectives. As an illustration, a multicultural product team may have an engineer at company headquarters in Germany, a marketing [Page 494]professional in the United States where the product will be sold, and a procurement specialist at the manufacturing facility in Mexico. These culturally diverse team members may have important insights into the local cultures involved with getting the product to market. The procurement specialist may have an in-depth understanding of shipping and procuring product parts in Mexico. The marketing professional may have an in-depth understanding of the U.S. consumer market. The engineer may be able to navigate the culture of the organization and ensure the product is consistent with the organization’s standards and values. The cultural diversity of the team helps the organization effectively design, manufacture, and market a product in a global environment.

Cultural diversity may signal the availability of relevant knowledge and differing perspectives, but effective information elaboration is needed for the team to benefit from the diversity. Information elaboration involves information exchange and knowledge integration. Factors such as a shared understanding of the task, team trust, and culturally intelligent leadership help support the information elaboration process.

While cultural diversity is the strength of multicultural work teams, it can also present challenges. Similarity-attraction theory and social categorization theory suggest potential difficulties as diverse team members interact. The similarity-attraction theory suggests that culturally homogeneous teams should be more productive than culturally diverse teams because of the mutual attraction shared among team members with similar backgrounds. Real or perceived differences in cultural values, such as work norms and respect for hierarchy, and the use of different styles of communication (e.g., low or high context) may lead to less efficient team processes, decreased social cohesion, or increased conflict. Similarly, social categorization theory suggests that team members categorize other team members into subgroups, which can form the basis for an in-group–out-group distinction. Team members may develop an intergroup bias in some conditions and favor and cooperate with members of their in-group more than with members of an out-group. As such, team members from the same culture rather than different cultures may be more attracted to and cooperate more with one another, making cross-cultural collaboration difficult. For example, team members fluent in the same language may be prejudiced toward those from other backgrounds and may preferentially provide opportunities for development or assign a coveted task to those who share the same primary language or accent. Acknowledging team member differences, emphasizing team goals, and fostering a shared team identity are some of the ways the negative effects of similarity-attraction and social categorization can be mitigated.

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