Unveiling the complexities of culturally diverse teams unfolding their multi-Faceted impacts: a longitudinal investigation

Abstract

Culturally diverse teamwork has become necessary and unavoidable today. Research on culturally diverse teams has been flourishing for more than a quarter of a century. Despite the extensive literature on culturally diverse teams, our understanding remains incomplete. Firstly, one critical issue is that the majority of current research on culturally diverse teams remains simplified and static, often overlooking the unfolding mechanism as culturally diverse teams evolve over time. This oversight is problematic because teams are constantly evolving and changing, which is particularly true for culturally diverse teams. The state of a team at one time may significantly differ from those at another time. Accordingly, the current literature’s dominant approach of employing cross-sectional or time-lagged designs by collecting data at a single point in time may fail to capture the evolving trajectory of culturally diverse teams and underestimate the complexity of how cultural diversity unfolds its impact on creativity over time. Secondly, the majority of research has focused on surface-level or readily detectable cultural diversity (e.g., race and nationality). To my knowledge, very little research has explored the role of deep-level diversity that involves deeply-embedded imprints of culture (e.g., values, beliefs, and assumptions). Considering that deep-level cultural diversity, which covers a broad range of values, beliefs, norms, and cognitive frameworks, tends to have a sustaining impact on team processes and outcomes, the existing limited attention on deep-level cultural diversity has impeded our further understanding of deep-level diversity, as well as the mechanism of how deep-level cultural diversity influences the social and informational development of culturally diverse teams and in turn impact creativity.
To address these limitations and advance the theoretical development of culturally diverse teams, the current study draws on the Categorisation-Elaboration Model (CEM) and investigates how team deep-level value diversity (i.e., power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and collectivism) unfolds its time-varying impact on team creativity via the evolving trajectory of team cohesion and information elaboration over time. Using a four-wave longitudinal field survey spanning approximately ten months from the team formation stage, this study reveals that rather than assuming value diversity has a similar pattern of influence, different dimensions of value diversity demonstrate distinctive and unique effects on team cohesion and information elaboration, and in turn creativity. To illustrate, diversity in power distance and uncertainty avoidance negatively impacts the initial level of team cohesion and information elaboration. In contrast, diversity in collectivism positively relates to the starting value of team cohesion and shows a non-significant relationship with the initial value of team information elaboration. Moreover, while diversity in power distance negatively impacts the increase of team cohesion and information elaboration over time, heterogeneity in uncertainty avoidance positively influences increases in both team cohesion and information elaboration over time.
Furthermore, an exploratory analysis was conducted to examine the reciprocal relationship between team cohesion and information elaboration given the current literature’s insufficient attention to the microdynamics within culturally diverse teams. My findings show a unidirectional relationship between team cohesion and information elaboration, indicating that team cohesion at one point in time is influenced by the prior episode of information elaboration, but not the reverse.
In sum, my study makes theoretical contributions in three areas. Firstly, by revealing that the relationship between deep-level cultural diversity and creativity via the evolving trajectory of team cohesion and information elaboration over time is complicated and dynamic, this study shifts the focus from a static and simplified view of culturally diverse teams, promoting further theoretical development through a temporal lens. Secondly, by showing that deep-level cultural diversity is a multi-faceted construct, with different dimensions exerting distinct impacts on creativity via team cohesion and information elaboration, this study provides a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of deep-level cultural diversity and its impact on team functioning. Thirdly, my research reveals the inherent dynamics in the processes of culturally diverse teams by pointing out the unidirectional relationship between team cohesion and information elaboration. This finding is insightful in helping us open the black box of culturally diverse teams, enabling a better understanding to manage diversity. Overall, my results provide a more comprehensive and intricate picture of culturally diverse teams. The practical implications and limitations of the research are also discussed.

Date of Award	15 Nov 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Nottingham
Supervisor	Martin Liu (Supervisor) & Jie Wang (Supervisor)