Creating Value

Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 45-63, 2000

© 2000 Elsevier Science, Inc.

ISSN 0090-2616/OO/$-see frontmatter

PU S0090-2616(00)00012-7

Creating Value with Diverse

Teams in Global Management

JOSEPH J . DISTEFANO

INTRODUCTION

T

oday's economy increasingly requires

people to collaborate in teams that cross

cultural and geographic boundaries. Sometimes team members are all located in the

same physical setting. More and more frequently, they are scattered across a city, a

country, or the globe. In theory, these teams

should create significant competitive advantage by bringing together different ideas,

pools of knowledge, and approaches to

work. However, in practice global teams do

not often create the value expected. Instead,

members clash, and the teams are either paralyzed into inaction or worse. With today's

workforce demographics, the existence of

culturally diverse teams is inevitable; and

with today's competitive environment, firms

cannot afford to forego their value.

A few years ago we began a systematic

study of multicultural teams. The literature

told us that diverse teams have a lot of potential. Compared to homogeneous teams

they can be more creative, generate more and

MARTHA L. MAZNEVSKI

better alternatives to problems, and generate

more and better criteria for evaluating alternatives. However, in no research did diverse

teams outperform homogeneous ones on

overall solution quality, and in only one

study did they equal the homogeneous

teams. But a couple of studies and a wealth

of anecdotal evidence suggested a slightly

different story. Diverse teams tend to perform either better or worse than homogeneous ones, with more performing worse

than better (see Fig. 1). We set out to determine what distinguished the poor performers from the high performers, and to develop

ways of helping culturally diverse teams at

the bottom of the performance graph leapfrog the homogeneous teams and create

value....