| As a result of demographic changes and a changing in the international marketplace, culturally diverse workforce has become a daily reality for an increasing number of multinational companies and organizations. However in practice, the dichotomy arises where work teams of cultural diversity, while sometimes outperforming their homogeneous counterparts, more often turn out to be much less effective in many ways. International managers are now becoming more concerned about how to bring out the largest potential productivity of a culturally diverse workforce.This paper contends that understanding of the social-psychological causes and processes that explain potential benefits and liabilities of cultural diversity in multicultural teams is essential to managing multiculturalism in organizations; and principles of effective organizational interventions that minimize the negative impact of cultural diversity on work team performance need to be systematically constructed. This paper was therefore initiated to explore these dynamic issues from a constructivist, interpretivist and comparative perspective.Based on a combined strategy of grounded theory and case studies, multiple forms of qualitative data were collected from one-month field site observations and 11 in-depth interviews with people from diverse cultural backgrounds at the 2008 Summer Institute of Intercultural Communication which was held in Portland of the United States. Afterwards, another 10 in-depth interviews were conducted with non-SIIC informants from transnational organizations physically present in China to better understand the principles of successful organizational interventions.To this end, an attribution model was developed that integrates dynamics of cognitive, affective, attitudinal and behavioral dimensions of teams which are generated by cultural diversity and through which cultural diversity facilitates or inhibits effective team performance. Another model was then developed to integrate principles of successful organizational interventions that potentially minimize negative impact of cultural diversity on work team performance, which features strategies to create cultural synergy, recruit and select competent personnel, pre-coach, structure the team, establish flexible rules and norms, provide process assistance with management of external pressure and give feedbacks on a regular basis.Implications for future research on cultural diversity and management of diversity dynamics in team work process and outcomes are discussed. |
