When can culturally diverse teams be more creative? The role of leaders' benevolent paternalism

Published date01 May 2018
Date01 May 2018
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1002/job.2238
RESEARCH ARTICLE
When can culturally diverse teams be more creative? The role
of leaders'benevolent paternalism
Lin Lu
1
*|Fuli Li
2
*|Kwok Leung
3
|Krishna Savani
4
|Michael W. Morris
5
1
Antai College of Economics & Management,
Shanghai JiaoTong University, Shanghai, China
2
School of Management, Xi'an Jiaotong
University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China
3
Department of Management, The Chinese
University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong
4
Division of Strategy, Management, &
Organization, Nanyang Business School,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
5
Department of Management, Columbia
Business School, Columbia University, New
York, U.S.A.
Correspondence
Fuli Li, School of Management, Xi'an Jiaotong
University, No. 28, Xianning West Road, Xi'an,
Shaanxi, 710049, China.
Email: fuli@xjtu.edu.cn
Funding information
Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant/
Award Number: 71672113 and 71272113;
Nanyang Assistant Professorship grant
awarded by NanyangTechn ological University
Summary
The current research examines the conditions under which crosscultural teams can realize their
creative potentiala consequence of their cultural diversity. We propose that in more culturally
diverse teams, team members are less open when communicating with each other, which impairs
the team's ability to elaborate on the information contributed by different members, ultimately
limiting team creativity. We further theorize that leaders' benevolent paternalism, a leadership
style that is particularly prevalent in East Asian contexts, can reduce the negative consequence
of intercultural diversity on intercultural communication openness. On the basis of multiwave,
multisource data from 48 culturally diverse teams in China, we found that perceived intercultural
diversity is negatively related to intercultural communication openness, which, in turn, is posi-
tively related to information elaboration, and ultimately, team creativity. Leader benevolent
paternalism attenuates the negative relationship between intercultural diversity and intercultural
communication openness. These findings enrich the literature on intercultural diversity by calling
attention to communicationrelated obstacles.
KEYWORDS
intercultural communication, intercultural diversity, leader benevolent paternalism,team creativity
1|INTRODUCTION
In this era of globalization, organizations increasingly feature culturally
diverse teams. In this context, a pressing question is whether and when
cultural differences in norms, customs, beliefs, habits, and values in
teams, defined as intercultural diversity, promote team creativity (e.g.,
Gibson & Gibbs, 2006; Paletz, Peng, Erez, & Maslach, 2004; Rodriguez,
1998). Although the benefits of functional and educational diversity
are well documented (e.g., Bell, Villado, Lukasik, Briggs, & Belau,
2011), and people with diverse cultural backgrounds do bring different
perspectives on a problem (Salas & Gelfand, 2013), some recent stud-
ies have reported a negative relationship between intercultural diver-
sity and team creativity (Gibson & Gibbs, 2006; Nouri et al., 2013). In
fact, evidence about the relationship between intercultural diversity
and team creativity remains inconclusive. For example, a metaanalysis
revealed that intercultural diversity has an overall positive impact on
team creativity, but the effect size is small (.16) and the range of vari-
ation is very wide (.14 to .48; Stahl, Maznevski, Voigt, & Jonsen,
2010). This suggests that the effect may depend on the situation; it
may be moderated by factors that have not yet been identified, and
the mechanisms underlying this effect need to be carefully
investigated.
Theories of diversity have moved beyond testing the direct effects
of diversity on creativity to investigating factors moderating this rela-
tionship as well as processes mediating this relationship. Van
Knippenberg, De Dreu, and Homan (2004) proposed the categoriza-
tionelaboration model (CEM) to capture the complex effects of diver-
sity. This model states that diversity (whether as a function of gender,
generation, race, etc.) can give rise to categorization dynamics within
the team (members perceiving each other in terms of social categories,
as well as related stereotypes and biases), which interferes with the
team's information elaboration process (indepth processing of task
related information and perspectives), and thereby suppress team per-
formance, including team creativity.
Whereas the social categories form the basis of trust in Western
cultures (e.g., Giambatista & Bhappu, 2010; Greer, Homan, de Hoogh,
& den Hartog, 2012; Kearney & Gebert, 2009; O'Reilly, Williams, &
Barsade, 1998; Shin & Zhou, 2007; van Dick, Van Knippenberg,
Hägele, Guillaume, & Brodbeck, 2008), they may be somewhat less
*The first two authors made an equal contribution to the current manuscript.
Deceased.
Received: 29 July 2015 Revised: 16 August 2017 Accepted: 22 August 2017
DOI: 10.1002/job.2238
402 Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J Organ Behav. 2018;39:402415.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job

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