Team Leader-Member Similarity and Resilience: A Study in the Context of Multinational Teams

Abstract

Working in multinational teams can be demanding, stressful and challenging. Individuals working in such teams should therefore be equipped with resilience, a personal resource that helps foster the ability to cope with challenges and adversity. This paper aims to contribute to the scant research on resilience in an organizational context by examining the relationship between perceived and actual team leader / member similarity on the one hand and individual resilience on the other, specifically focusing on the effects of similarity in nationality and values in a multinational team setting. Hypotheses were tested on 365 dyads of team members and leaders working in 74 multinational Japanese-Western teams. The findings reveal that only deep-level actual (rather than merely perceived) similarity of values fosters resilience, both directly and through perceived similarity, while similarity in nationality alone is not directly related to resilience. Based on these findings, the paper suggests implications and future lines of inquiry in the under-studied field of resilience in the organizational context.