DOES CULTURAL DIVERSITY MATTER FOR TEAM PERFORMANCE IN MULTINATIONAL COMPANIES? AN ANALYSIS OF CONFLICT, COMMUNICATION, SOCIAL INTEGRATION, CREATIVITY AND SATISFACTION

Team performance is key in each organisation. Hence, cultural effects in teams are a relevant matter of subject clarifying the ambiguous findings from previous research. With this background, we investigate how the macro-constructs of conflict, communication effectiveness, social integration, creativity and satisfaction interact with cultural diversity on team performance in an environment characterised by a largely homogeneous and ethnic workforce. We test our hypotheses on a sample of firms in Thailand. Our results indicate that creativity and satisfaction have a significant positive impact on team performance whereas cultural diversity has a significant positive impact on influencing conflict in a team-based environment. However, cultural diversity has no significant impact on communication effectiveness and social integration, and it has no significant impact on team performance. The key theoretical contributions from our study are that cultural diversity can contribute to conflict even in a team composition that is seemingly cohesive and homogeneous in nature. Further, our study establishes that creativity and satisfaction have a positive effect on team performance even in the context of a homogeneous and ethnically majority-based team. For the practitioners, the results of the study indicate that initial actions need to be taken by the leaders of multicultural teams as they create teams to avoid the initial pitfalls due to conflict.

Global and local identities on the balance scale: Predicting transformational leadership and effectiveness in multicultural teams

The performance of multicultural teams depends, to a great extent, on the effectiveness of their leaders. Transformational leadership is thought to be effective across organizational contexts and national cultures; yet we know little about what shapes these leadership behaviors. This study argues that leaders’ social identity configurations influence their transformational leadership behaviors and leadership effectiveness in multicultural settings. Building upon the global acculturation model, we test the effects of four identity configurations, based on the relative strength and balance of identification with the global and local cultures. We suggest that multicultural team leaders with balanced identity configurations, either glocal (high global, high local) or marginal (low global, low local), demonstrate more transformational leadership and consequently are more effective than leaders with unbalanced (dominant global or dominant local) configurations. Data were collected from 298 MBA students who worked on a four-week project in 77 multicultural teams. We used polynomial regression to capture how the discrepancy between the global and local components of leaders’ identity configurations affects transformational leadership behaviors and effectiveness. The results generally support the theoretical model, showing that the most transformational and effective leaders are those with balanced identity configurations. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Leadership Competencies Development Among Academic Staffs: A Preliminary Observation

Every organization needs a leader who is competent in managing change to meet the current demands of remaining competitive in the market, policy demands in government policy, information technology that is evolving day by day. Development of the global technologies required leadership competencies in order to achieve the organizational goal within the current trend setting. Hence, leadership competency development is embracing from time to time to fulfil the organization need not only in technology sector but also to cater the employee’s requirement such as skills, knowledges and abilities as well. Competent leaders manage to drive the employees towards the organization objective. They play their roles bringing the employees to work towards the strategic planning that have been plan ahead. This is essential because leader who perform well delegating task and to motivates employees to excellence and in the same time avoid conflict can easily adapt and participate in multicultural teams. This paper investigates the characteristics of leadership development programme that suit for the future leader among academic staffs.

Cultural influence on innovativeness - links between “The Culture Map” and the “Global Innovation Index”

In the ongoing debate on the relation of cultural differences and national innovativeness this research aims to find out which of the seven cultural dimensions of The Culture Map (communicating, evaluating, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing, scheduling) have a significant influence on a nation’s ability and capacity to innovate. The findings show that cultural aspects as described by The Culture Map clearly influence the innovativeness of a nation. Based on these findings, tentative recommendations for fruitful monocultural and multicultural teams respectively are given.

The Influence of Transformational Leadership, Cultural Orientation, and Emotional Conflict on Innovation in Multicultural Teams

Multicultural teams represent a key strategic action that generate significant competitive advantages and innovation. The authors address the question of how transformational leadership, cultural orientation, and emotional conflict impact on multicultural teams focused on innovation. The methodology used has a quantitative and transversal approach because the measurement is carried out in a specific moment. The sample is composed by 415 multicultural-team members working in multinational companies. Results indicate that the dimension of intellectual stimulation and a horizontal hierarchy are factors that influence the team innovation. In contrast, the emotional conflict did not show a significant relationship. The positive moderating effect of organizational support on intellectual stimulation and team innovation´s relationship is proven. This study contributes significantly to international human resource management domain by leading to a better understanding of the functioning of work teams to ensure business innovation and the need for internationalization.