We aimed to give answer for the question: What is the influence of cultural diversity on performance of multicultural teams? and What is the influence of team members’ cultural intelligence on performance of multicultural teams?
In the following section, the hypotheses and their respective results will be discussed and contributions to the theoretical and empirical analysis are presented if relevant.
7.1 Main findings
The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the two following relationships: Firstly, the effect of cultural diversity on MCT’s performance and the moderating effect of CQ on this relationship, secondly, the impact of CQ on MCT’s performance. Results show that higher degrees of similarity, rather than diversity, are conducive
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By confirming this negative relationship, the study at hand substantiates value similarity and work similarity, rather than the social category perspective. According to Stahl et al. (2010), “diversity impairs team performance because team members are attracted to individuals with similar attributes, which they categorize as the in-group”. Team members categorize dissimilar people into out-groups, which can lead to discrimination, and corrupt the effective functioning of teams (Stahl et al., 2010). The negative effect of diversity also suggests that team members in multicultural team in Vietnam do not know how to successfully deal with diversity in teams. Given that 46.26% of the respondents had lived abroad for more than six months, it is very likely that they do know how to successfully interact and work with people from different …show more content…
Moon (2013) confirmed that “CQ attenuates the negative effect of cultural diversity on MCT’s performance” and “improve the performance at a faster pace than those with lower CQ” based on the surface-level of diversity while the finding for the role of CQ in the Vietnamese context was refuted for some conclusive evidences. Moon (2013) only focused on diversity of culture at the surface level and measured team performance and cultural intelligence over a long period of 15 weeks over three conjunctive tasks. In the meanwhile, the data collected in this survey in Vietnamese context was collected randomly without knowing exactly whether the team was built for a long time or not, which impaired the results. In case of a new team, it is normal that cultural intelligence cannot have immediate influence on performance of a multicultural team and hardly can people in a team understand about their peers to work more effectively to weaken the effects of cultural diversity on team performance. Moreover, the problem may come from the difference in level of analysis that selected measurements rely on with respondents’ CQ measured on an individual basis as provided themselves while cultural diversity and team performance being perception-based