A look at the bright side of multicultural team diversity

SummaryCurrent research on multicultural teams tends to exhibit a bias towards studying the negative effects of team diversity more than the positive. This negative bias has limited our understanding of the conditions that promote the benefits of diversity and of the mechanisms that foster these benefits. In this article, we highlight a complementary perspective, namely the idea that cultural diversity and cultural differences can be an asset rather than a liability. This perspective has been present in the practitioner and anecdotal literature, but has thus far not received much rigorous research attention. Using a lens of Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS), we draw upon recent research on cultural diversity in teams to explore the positive aspects of cross-cultural dynamics in teams and identify some of the processes underlying these effects in more rigorous ways, proposing a future research agenda.