WIP: Cultural diversity and teamwork effectiveness: A systematized literature review

Abstract

With the rapid progress of globalization, multicultural teams are prevailing in business practice to meet companies' needs, especially in transnational corporations, and in classroom teaching based on effective team-based learning pedagogy in engineering education settings. Multicultural teams have the potential to outperform monoculture teams, particularly on certain outcomes, such as creativity; however, the role of cultural diversity in teams is ambiguous. Therefore, it is worth investigating relevant literature in the impact of cultural diversity on teamwork effectiveness. This paper aims to explore the following questions: (1) what aspects of cultural diversity and teamwork effectiveness have been studied in research literature since 2010? (2) What is the relationship between cultural diversity and teamwork effectiveness? We explore three databases in both education and psychology, apply inclusion and exclusion criteria and finally select 14 papers to conduct this systematized literature review. We find out that both cultural diversity and team effectiveness are multi-faceted constructs. We also confirm the complex relationship between cultural diversity and team effectiveness, which could be moderated or mediated by mixed factors. In this paper, we identify the emphasis and gaps from literature on how to transform cultural collision into cultural synergy, to help increase culture and diversity awareness and suggest practical interventions to improve team effectiveness in the context of engineering education.