The Effects of Cultural Diversity on Team Performance: A Comparison between the Performance of Monocultural Teams and the Performance of Multicultural Teams in Tourism Organizations

Abstract

One can notice in nowadays organizations it is a common fact to find teams composed of members of different nationalities. It was the author’s curiosity to find out why do managers prefer to work with people of different nationalities and which are the advantages that a multicultural team has to offer. Many studies focused on finding out what effect has the cultural diversity on team outcomes. After analyzing the previous studies, one can conclude that the cultural diversity plays also a positive and a negative role on team performance. A case study was conducted in the romanian tourism organizations to find out if multicultural teams obtain better performances than monocultural teams. The sample was composed of 30 teams similar in terms of work processes and tasks, size, percentage of males and females (15 monocultural teams and 15 multicultural teams) and the method used to collect the data was the structured survey. The instrument used to interpretate the data was the five Likert scale. The results showed that multicultural teams obtain higher scores, are more inovative and offer new ideas and perspectives, but their members are more individualist when it comes to help others. Although the communication is more intense inside the multicultural teams, it hasn’t been demonstrated it is related to work issues. This research could be a starting point for future studies on the relationship between cultural diversity and team performance.