Psychological Factors Surrounding Disagreement in Multicultural Design Team Meetings

As multicultural teams become the norm, research is increasingly directed to understanding their challenges and opportunities. Our research contrasts two theories of creativity in multicultural teams. The dual-process model focuses on the effects of level of diversity, whereas cross-cultural psychology focuses on specific cultural compositions. In individualistic cultures, team members see conflict as an opportunity, tend to express more conflicts, and benefit from conflict compared to collectivistic cultures that emphasize harmony and see conflict as threatening. The relative representation of members from these cultures may affect team dynamics, conflict, and creativity. This study tested these theories using the DTRS11 dataset. We coded over 3100 speaker turns for the presence of disagreements, or micro-conflicts, and examined the effects of conflict phase and team diversity on creativity in the moment, promotion, and prevention approaches to conflict using Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) measures. We found that micro-conflicts increased insight words in the moment of the conflict. Individuals in more diverse team meetings of Scandinavians and Southeast Asians expressed fewer conflicts than teams dominated by Scandinavians and were less likely to focus on potential gains and opportunities when experiencing micro-conflicts. Interestingly, regardless of conflict, the more culturally diverse teams were more likely to use insight words and promotion words overall. There were no effects for prevention. These findings support extant theory, and extend it to different types of heterogeneous teams in a real-world design setting. This study is novel in combining theory on team cultural diversity with a micro-process method.