Multiculturals in Multicultural Teams

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Multiculturals in Multicultural Teams

🔥 People are always saying diversity matters. As a powerful tool for creative work, culturally diverse groups are becoming increasingly common. However, simply assembling a multicultural team doesn't always guarantee a high level of creativity, as cultural diversity can be a trigger, but also a barrier for team effectiveness.

To address the problem of how multicultural teams can leverage their diverse cultural background to produce creative outcomes while avoiding the pitfalls of cultural diversity, Jang (2017) from INSEAD proposed a new model. Jang believes that multiculturals, people who have internalised more than one cultural schemas, can play a unique and positive role in culturally diverse groups. To understand why, we need to look at 2 concepts: "cultural overlap" and "cultural brokerage".

Cultural Overlap

Cultural overlap refers to the extent to which an individual shares cultural membership with others in a group. The degree of cultural overlap determines if a multicultural is a cultural insider or outsider.
- Insiders: Share the cultural background of some or all group members, e.g., a Japanese Brazilian in a group of Japanese and/or Brazilians;
- Outsiders: Share the cultural background of none of the group members, e.g., a Japanese Brazilian in a group of Germans and Chinese.

Cultural Brokerage

Multiculturals benefit a culturally diverse group through a process called 'cultural brokerage', which is the act of facilitating interactions between members across cultural boundaries. Jang's experiments reveal that the type of cultural brokerage by cultural insiders and outsiders are different: the insiders often integrate while the outsiders tend to elicit knowledge from different cultures:

• INTEGRATE: Combine the ideas and knowledge from the varying cultures that group members share and evolve into a whole new one. As cultural insiders are already familiar with the shared cultures, it is much easier for them to integrate knowledge and ideas than outsiders when they involve in cultural brokerage.
• ELICIT: Inquire about the relevant ideas and knowledge that other group members hold so that these resources can be fully explored and utilised. As cultural outsiders don't have significant knowledge on any of the other cultures represented in the group, they have a natural incentive to gather the information from the others, which insiders often overlook.

Although cultural insiders contribute to team creative performance in a direct way while cultural outsiders contribute indirectly, they both play an essential role in a multicultural team.

Source: Jang, S (2017), "Cultural Brokerage and Creative Performance in Multicultural Teams", Organization Science 28(6):993-1009.

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		2 David Wilson Manager, Canada
	Does Cultural Diversity Always Result in Creativity? Hi Chloe: It's an interesting concept - dealing with how insiders and outsiders work in a multicultural (culturally diverse) group. How would you address the need for cultural diversity in a organization or country with minimal diversity (e.g., China, India) versus an organization or country with significant diversity (e.g., UK, USA)? Do you also have to watch for the basic or underlying concepts associated with the organizations or countries, such as, freedom of speech, freedom of travel, etc. In addition, I agree that cultural diversity does not automatically results in creativity. I believe creativity also requires leadership, innovation and empowerment. What happens if the group has no power to make decisions or deploy resources? The idea of sharing cultural knowledge is important for any organization (or team) to successfully function, especially if you believe we all live on planet Earth.

		3 John Henry Project Manager, United States
	What Really Encourages Creativity? 1. Creativity is encouraged, only when creativity is valued, encouraged, and rewarded. 2. Teamwork, when incorporated in a participation valued organization encourages creativity. 3. An agile methodology to problem solving, a Lean Six Sigma approach to process improvement, encourage both creativity and participation by non-management. So 4. But the only thing that REALLY encourages creativity, is a top-down communicated value for creative problem solving, process improvement, and organizational change. So, for there to be a creative culture, there has to be a conscious effort to make creative ideas, important, both by encouraging idea generation, and by valuing failure correctly. Experimentation is exactly that. Sometimes the attempt is not 100% successful. If it is valued correctly, the attempt is rewarded, and the subsequent process improvement that makes the experiment successful, is encouraged. 5. Creativity is encouraged, when it is valued and allowed.

		1 Chloe Xu Director, Australia
	Dealing with Cultural Diversity @David Wilson: Thank you for your reaction, David. Dealing with diversity is difficult. Taking China as an example, the country has 56 ethnic groups, 55 of which are minorities. Some share the same religions and some don't. But the modern China is not a country of immigrants. So you can imagine these minorities have been living in the country for at least hundreds of years. Over this long period, there must be intensive exchanges of language, knowledge, custom, and etc, which makes the minorities now feel easy and comfortable to live in the country while keeping their own culture. Getting used to a diverse environment takes time and people within a such environment need to find a balance between diversity and assimilation that serves their individual needs.