Team creativity/innovation in culturally diverse teams: A meta‐analysis

• Author: Kwok Leung,Tingting Chen,Jie Wang,Grand H.‐L. Cheng
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• Date: 01 July 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2362

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Team creativity/innovation in culturally diverse teams:

A meta‐analysis

Jie Wang

1

|Grand H.‐L. Cheng

2

|Tingting Chen

3

|Kwok Leung

4

1

Nottingham University Business School

China, University of Nottingham Ningbo China,

Ningbo, China

2

Centre for Ageing Research and Education,

Duke‐NUS Medical School, Singapore

3

Department of Management, Lingnan

University, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong

4

Department of Management, The Chinese

University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong

Correspondence

Jie Wang, Nottingham University Business

School China, University of Nottingham

Ningbo China, 199 Taikang East Road, Ningbo

315100, China.

Email: jie.wang@nottingham.edu.cn

Summary

This meta‐analysis investigates the direction and strength of the relationship between

diversity in culturally diverse teams and team creativity/innovation. We distinguish

the effects of two diversity levels (i.e., surface level vs. deep level) in culturally diverse

teams and examine the moderators suggested by the socio‐technical systems frame-

work (i.e., team virtuality and task characteristics in terms of task interdependence,

complexity, and intellectiveness). Surface‐level diversity in culturally diverse teams

is not related to team creativity/innovation, whereas deep‐level diversity in culturally

diverse teams is positively related to team creativity/innovation. Moreover, surface‐

level diversity in culturally diverse teams and team creativity/innovation are nega-

tively related for simple tasks but unrelated for complex tasks. Deep‐level diversity

in culturally diverse teams and team creativity/innovation is positively related for

collocated teams and interdependent tasks but unrelated for noncollocated teams

and independent tasks. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications.

KEYWORDS

cultural diversity,meta‐analysis, surface level versus deeplevel, team creativity, team innovation

1|INTRODUCTION

The globalization of business has led to rising cultural diversity in the

workplace in many regions of the world. Multicultural teams, in which

members come from different countries or ethnic groups with differ-

ences in mental models, modes of perception, and approaches to

problems (Stahl, Maznevski, Voigt, & Jonsen, 2010), have become

prevalent. Cultural diversity is regarded as a mixed blessing for teams

(van Knippenberg, De Dreu, & Homan, 2004). Multicultural teams can

achieve high team performance mainly through enhancing team

creativity/innovation—the only positive immediate team outcome of

cultural diversity proposed in Stahl et al.'s (2010) meta‐analysis. Cul-

tural diversity provides diverse information that is a key ingredient

for team creativity/innovation (Adler, 1986; Stahl et al., 2010), which

is “the process, outcomes, and products of attempts to develop and

introduce new and improved ways of doing things”by a team of

employees (Anderson, Potočnik, & Zhou, 2014, p. 1298). This possible

strength of cultural diversity is a chief reason that many multinationals

utilize multicultural teams (Gibson, Huang, Kirkman, & Shapiro, 2014;

Hajro, Gibson, & Pudelko, 2017; Lisak, Erez, Sui, & Lee, 2016). How-

ever, cultural diversity also incurs social costs such as cultural identity

problems and difficulties in intercultural interaction (Leung & Wang,

2015), which may offset the creative potential of diverse groups

(Giambatista & Bhappu, 2010). Therefore, the effect of cultural diver-

sity on team creativity/innovation must be investigated to understand

how to leverage cultural diversity.

The association between cultural diversity and team

creativity/innovation has attracted considerable research attention.

Primary studies have reported varied correlations for this relationship

(e.g., Gibson & Gibbs, 2006; Li, Lin, Tien, & Chen, 2017; Schilpzand,

Herold, & Shalley, 2011; Stringfellow, 1998). Prior meta‐analytic

reviews, which are based on limited samples (k≤8), have also

reported mixed findings, with pooled effect sizes ranging from −0.18

to 0.16 (Bell, Villado, Lukasik, Belau, & Briggs, 2011; Stahl et al.,

2010; van Dijk, van Engen, & van Knippenberg, 2012). These observa-

tions indicate a strong need to investigate the moderators that affect

Received: 25 January 2017 Revised: 13 February 2019 Accepted: 25 February 2019

DOI: 10.1002/job.2362

J Organ Behav. 2019;40:693–708. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job 693

the direction and strength of this relationship (van Knippenberg &

Mell, 2016).

The current meta‐analysis examines the direction and strength of

the association between diversity in culturally diverse teams and team

creativity/innovation with a larger database (47 samples). We consider

the surface‐versus deep‐level distinction of diversity in culturally

diverse teams and examine how both diversity levels are associated

with team creativity/innovation. Moreover, on the basis of the

socio‐technical systems framework for cultural diversity and team cre-

ativity (Leung & Wang, 2015), we investigate the moderating effects

of team virtuality and task characteristics (task interdependence,

complexity, and intellectiveness) on the associations of surface‐and

deep‐level diversity in culturally diverse teams with team

creativity/innovation. We thus provide a nuanced picture of how the

association between diversity in multicultural teams and team

creativity/innovation varies.

2|THEORY DEVELOPMENT AND

HYPOTHESES

2.1 |Team creativity/innovation in culturally diverse

teams

Culture is “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes

the members of one human group from another”(Hofstede, 1980,

p. 25). It includes a set of motives, values, beliefs, and identities that

guides how its members should or should not behave (House, Hanges,

Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004). Culture can be viewed as a multi-

level system, ranging from team culture, to organizational culture, to

national culture (Erez, 2011), and it is a source of social identity for its

members (Leung & Bond, 2004). This study focuses on national culture,

which is based on countries or ethnicities, because many countries

nowadays have several ethnic cultures, and many ethnic cultures span

across more than one country (Leung, Bhagat, Buchan, Erez, & Gibson,

2005; Tung, 1993). Moreover, the shared elements (e.g., language,

historic period, and geographic location) can provide standards for

perceiving, believing, evaluating, and acting among people in the same

country or ethnic group (Triandis, 1996). Thus, the term cultural

diversity is concerned with surface‐level differences in country‐and

ethnicity‐based cultural backgrounds, as well as deep‐level differences

in values, perspectives, and cognitive frameworks possessed by people

from different countries/ethnicities. Thus, this term includes surface‐

and deep‐level diversity in culturally diverse teams.

Following previous meta‐analyses (e.g., Byron & Khazanchi, 2012;

Byron, Khazanchi, & Nazarian, 2010), we include team creativity and

innovation studies. Creativity is concerned with idea generation,

whereas innovation involves idea generation and its subsequent

implementation (Anderson et al., 2014; Hughes, Lee, Tian, Newman,

& Legood, 2018). Although innovation involves a convergent process

of idea implementation, both creativity and innovation emphasize a

divergent process of idea generation that can benefit from a broad

pool of perspectives supplied by diversity in multicultural teams.

Despite their differences, creativity and innovation have been

regarded as two closely related and overlapped concepts. Researchers

have argued that their conceptual boundaries are unclear (Anderson

et al., 2014). Many empirical studies that have distinguished creativity

and innovation end up combining them because of their high correla-

tions (van Knippenberg, 2017). Therefore, our meta‐analysis does not

distinguish them but treats team creativity/innovation as the exclusive

focal dependent variable.

According to the categorization–information elaboration model

(CEM; van Knippenberg et al., 2004), diversity in multicultural teams

has negative and positive effects on team creativity/innovation.

CEM cautions that multicultural teams may not leverage diversity

due to the negative social dynamics set into motion by diversity—

known as the social categorization perspective (Williams & O'Reilly,

1998). People may view team members of different cultural back-

grounds as out‐group members and exhibit negative biases against

them. Consequently, team members may feel their cultural identity

being threatened and/or a lack of a common cultural identity in the

team, which results in low team identity. Moreover, members with dif-

ferent cultural backgrounds may have incompatible assumptions,

values, preferences, and behaviors and are thus likely to experience

difficulties in intercultural interaction. Cultural identity problems and

difficulties in intercultural interaction are negative social processes or

social costs that suppress team creativity/innovation (e.g., Dahlin,

Weingart, & Hinds, 2005; van Knippenberg et al., 2004).

CEM also argues that diversity in multicultural teams offers diverse

perspectives and knowledge that enhance team creativity/innovation

(Adler, 1986)—known as the information/decision‐making perspective

on diversity (Williams & O'Reilly, 1998). By offering a great pool of

information, such diversity has the potential of inducing information

elaboration, which is defined as “members' exchange, discussion, and

integration of ideas, knowledge, and insights relevant to the group's

task”(van Knippenberg et al., 2004, p. 1010). The possible informa-

tional benefits explain why diversity in multicultural teams enhances

team creativity/innovation. In summary, the social categorization and

information/decision‐making perspectives predict opposite directions

of the relationship between diversity in multicultural teams and team

creativity/innovation. Taking these perspectives together, we

may explain the mixed findings in previous primary and meta‐analytic

studies.

Note that the antecedent–benefit–cost (ABC) framework

(Busse, Mahlendorf, & Bode, 2016) can help understand the

relationship between diversity in multicultural teams and team

creativity/innovation. The ABC framework highlights the importance

of considering costs and benefits in an antecedent–outcome relation-

ship. The framework suggests that the direction and strength of the

relationship depend on the marginal effects of costs and benefits. In

our study, whether social costs or informational benefits function

more prominently determines the direction and strength of the

relationship between diversity in multicultural teams and team

creativity/innovation. Hence, we examine the moderators that may

affect the relative prominence of social costs versus informational

benefits caused by diversity in multicultural teams.

694 WANG ET AL.