Cultural diversity in semi-virtual teams: A multicultural esports team study

Abstract

How does cultural diversity influence the performance of semi-virtual teams? We use the prism of esports and insights from virtual identity research and social categorization theory to determine the effect on semi-virtual teams in which member interaction is not necessarily mediated or constrained by physical world sociocultural norms. The common ground that has developed in esports results in a superordinate, culture-free gamer identity that transcends the virtual and physical worlds, and thus multicultural teams can enjoy the benefits of diverse knowledge without suffering unduly from social disintegration when gamer identity is salient -a reality challenged less in the virtual world than in the physical one. We conduct an empirical study using data from 4035 League of Legends games played by 102 multicultural teams from 2017 to 2020. Our results show that cultural diversity improves the quality of team strategy when gamer identity becomes more salient, and that that may come about when players are intensely exposed to the game world, when they play with many different virtual characters, and when they play at home court.

Comunicación relacional y su contribución a la resiliencia de las organizaciones en la virtualidad

“…No obstante, el desarrollo de una estrategia de comunicación relacional requiere de la disposición de los colaboradores (Stergiou y Farmaki, 2021). Las diferencias culturales y sociales que caracterizan a los equipos virtuales (Lin et al, 2023;Stahl y Maznevski, 2021) también se configuran como un reto para la comunicación. Sobre todo, en entornos en los que los espacios de socialización son limitados (Borowki y Stathopoulos, 2023).…”