| Interacting in multicultural teams has become increasingly commonplace, be it in the form of work teams, learning groups, or community groups in public and private organizational settings. An important form of learning that is conversational resides in team members' work together, forming an essential building block for knowledge creation. The dissertation examines several dimensions of such learning with two questions: How do members of multicultural teams learn from their conversational experience together? How does a team's conversational context influence the conversational learning among its members?; To address these questions, a dominant qualitative mixed research design was developed to analyze the experience of 6 parallel multicultural work teams distinguished by varying levels of psychological safety. Located at a U.S.-based management school, each team was composed of 7 or 8 MBA students responsible for numerous projects that called for intensive collaboration over the course of a year. Analysis of interview data at the team level culminated in the construction of 6 multi-layered team narratives illustrating conversational dynamics for each group. This analysis revealed that conversational learning was located in the retrospective meaning-making of experience.; Subsequent inductive inter-group analyses led to a four-phased model for conversational learning in multicultural groups that builds on experiential learning theory. The model emphasizes the role of the experience of difference as triggering conversational learning, the importance of developing a vocabulary of juxtaposition to articulate difference, and the value of distinguishing between integration-orientation (where team members are able to synthesize different points of view into a coherent whole) and contrast-orientation (where team members espouse an either-or approach and maintain a particular point of view) in such learning.; The research findings also point to ways in which the relational context, particularly the team's psychological safety, affects the quality of conversational learning. Members of teams with high levels of psychological safety spoke about their team in strikingly similar terms and demonstrated more integration-orientation in their conversational learning than teams with low levels of psychological safety. The research carries interesting implications for management education, knowledge creation, and team development theory. |
