Cultural Antecedents and Performance Consequences of OpenCommunication and Knowledge Transfer in Multicultural Process-Innovation Teams

Processes in multinational corporations (MNCs) have to be configured with regard to thechallenges of a permanently evolving environment. Process-innovation teams are considered tobe powerful tools inside organisations to cope with this necessity. Their performance is of majorimportance for most MNCs. As a response to the increasing internationalization andglobalization of markets, these teams show a growing culturally diverse composition. This articlefocuses on two major processes that are discussed to decide about a positive or a negativeperformance of a team: intra-team communication style and knowledge transfer. Explicitly, thisarticle a) tests for the influence of cultural diversity on intra-team communication and knowledgetransfer, and b) empirically examines the impact of the openness of intra-team communicationand knowledge transfer on the performance of multicultural teams. A quantitative empiricalsurvey among 84 team-members of 20 culturally diverse teams within a German sportswearcompany is used to test the relationships. Findings reveal that national cultural diversity has nosignificant impact on intra-team communication and knowledge transfer but both of them havesignificant influences on different measures of performance....