Cultural Diversity's Impact On Interaction Process and Performance: Comparing Homogeneous and Diverse Task Groups

Cultural diversity and plant-level productivity

“…Further examples include Watson et al (1993), Richard (2000), Hamilton et al (2003Hamilton et al ( , 2004, Ellison et al (2010), Hoogendorn and van Prag (2012), and others. Horwitz and Horwitz (2007) provide a meta-study on the impact of diversity on team performance.…”

Ethnic and gender diversity, process and performance in groups of business students in Sweden

“…From one side, it is claimed that culturally diverse teams offer diversity of values, resulting in effective group discussions that ultimately lead to enhanced group performance (Hofstede, 1984;McCarrey, 1988). Moreover, cultural diversity of groups leads to more cooperative choices (Cox et al, 1991) and better performance in comparison with homogeneous groups in identifying perspectives of the problems and generating solution alternatives (Watson et al, 1993). The voices from the other side of the argument, however, are louder and supported by more empirical evidence.…”

“…Generally, many researchers have come to the conclusion that cultural diversity has a negative effect on processes taking place within the team such as communication (Triandis, 1960) and result in emotional (Pelled, 1996) and competitive conflicts (Kirchmeyer and Cohen, 1992). These conditions in turn lead to lower performance when compared to the ethnically homogeneous learning teams (Watson et al 1993), since ethnically diverse team members are likely to have fewer shared experiences, less in common, and more difference of opinion, usually leading to conflict within the team (Pfeffer, 1983) However, several authors have claimed that ethnically diverse teams will be superior to ethnically homogeneous teams in their effectiveness in complex problem solving (Shaw, 1983).Hence, this leads us to the following three propositions: It is argued that efficiency of communication as well as effectiveness in complex problem solving will have a positive influence on team performance (Smith et al, 1994). Eisenhardt and Bourgeois (1988) found that teams that experience internal strife or conflict decline in performance.…”

“…In studies of learning teams, Watson and colleagues (Watson and Kumar, 1992;Watson et al, 1993) generally came to the conclusion that during the early stages of team life, ethnically diverse teams perform less effectively than non-diverse teams . However, over time not only do these differences wash out, but they may become an asset for team results (Wagner, 1995).…”

How diverse is your team? Investigating gender and nationality diversity in GitHub teams

“…Previous research reports contrasting evidence about the role of diversity in team work: some studies report significant positive correlations between diversity and performance [11], while others found that diversity negatively impacts team outcomes [30].…”