Cultural diversity in work teams and wellbeing impairments: A stress perspective

Abstract

It is empirically found that cultural diversity can influence group dynamics and social resources and demands. This study aims to explore if and how the effects of social demands and resources vary across teams of different levels of cultural diversity in the form of team compositions. This study proposes a research model to examine the associations between social demands (i.e., a lack of trust and accountability, misunderstanding and disagreement), social resources (i.e., managerial support and a positive team environment) and wellbeing impairments and empirically tests the model across three different team compositions. The sample is composed of 1049 participants who completed an online survey, working in either monocultural teams (i.e., one nationality only), bicultural teams (i.e., two nationalities), or multicultural teams (i.e., three or more nationalities). Multigroup structural equation modelling (SEM) was adopted to analyze the data and to perform cross-group comparison. The results show that the cultural composition of the team does influence the relationship between social demands and individual team members’ wellbeing. A lack of trust and accountability was found to be a significant predictor of wellbeing impairments in only mono- and bicultural teams, not in multicultural teams. Misunderstanding and disagreement was found to be positively associated with wellbeing impairments only in multicultural work teams, not in bi- or monocultural teams. No differences were found when comparing the effects of social resources on individual team members’ wellbeing between the three different types of teams.