What Is The Impact Of Cultural Diversity On Team Performance?
Having cultural diversity is currently a trend along with the globalization — the majority of companies in the world normally have several different branches in multiple locations. Most people believe that cultural diversity has immense impact on team performance, and it is necessary for teams to become multicultural (qtd. in Stahl et al. 3). Simply understanding others becomes old-fashioned and is no longer enough for either managers or employees surviving in today’s diverse working environment; employees are expected to concurrently and effectively interact with people from different cultures (qtd. in Stahl et al. 3). According to meta-analysis of the studies done by Stahl et al., although the impact of cultural diversity changes depending on a team’s situation, cultural diversity certainly has influence on five variables — communication, conflict, cohesion, satisfaction, and creativity — that can cooperatively influence team overall performance (8).
Effective communication is an important criterion of a good team performance, requiring individuals to acquire common language and have shared value, and cultural diversity can reduce the effectiveness of communication because of language and value difference (Stahl et al. 8). For example, a person, who is born and raised in an Eastern country, may have communication problems while working at a U.S. company and being surrounded by Western people. Because people subconsciously learn their values and beliefs during young ages, his values, beliefs and behaviors vary from which was taught in a Western country. He learned from his culture that never rejecting others’ requests is a merit; however, he will soon find out that he can be overwhelmed by too many tasks, and people do not appreciate if he continuously give promises but cannot provide good outcomes. In this case, ineffective communication caused by cultural diversity can led to conflicts and affects team performance.
Conflict is usually caused when people have different priorities or opinions because of various personal demands and needs (qtd. in Stahl et al. 9). Although some studies showed that team performance can be increased by task conflict and decreased by personal and process conflicts, any type of conflict can negatively affect team performance (qtd. in Stahl et al. 9). Similar to the causes of ineffective communication, reasons that trigger conflicts are differences of backgrounds and experiences (qtd. in Stahl et al. 9). Besides the variable called conflict, cohesion can also be influenced by cultural diversity. Cohesion refers to “attraction to the group, satisfaction with other members, and the nature of social interaction among group members” (qtd. in Stahl et al. 9), and Mullen and Coper indicated that cohesion has significant and positive impact on team performance (qtd. in Stahl et al. 10). Stahl et al. explained that the impacts of cultural diversity on cohesion vary depending on the type of diversity (10); therefore, cultural diversity can variedly affect performance due to different circumstances.
Cultural diversity also influences individuals’ satisfaction and inspires creativity within a team (Stahl et al. 8). Based on the meta-analysis of studies done by Stahl et al., diversity was found to have negative impact on satisfaction (qtd. in Stahl et al. 10); consequently, it can harm team performance. The reason that people are not satisfied working in a diverse environment is because they are not comfortable when being with dissimilar people (qtd. in Stahl et al. 6). On the contrary, diverse working environment is considered as a better soil for incubating creativities, which is a recognized source of team performance (qtd. in Stahl et al. 9). Individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds can provide ideas from distinct perspectives; their experiences will make easier to inspire creativity, and will accordingly promote a team performance.
After learning and analyzing the impact of cultural diversity on team performance, I personally believe that cultural diversity can benefit team performance in certain ways; however, it requires managers to think in-depth for effectively utilizing the cultural diversity, and finding methods to convert process loss, such as communication problem and conflict, into gain.
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