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Peer-reviewed

Research Article

The Effectiveness of Teamwork Training on Teamwork Behaviors and Team Performance: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Controlled Interventions

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation School of Kinesiology, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Affiliation Departments of Kinesiology/Physical Education and Psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Affiliation Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

• Desmond McEwan, 
• Geralyn R. Ruissen, 
• Mark A. Eys, 
• Bruno D. Zumbo, 
• Mark R. Beauchamp

• Published: January 13, 2017
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169604
• Reader Comments

The objective of this study was to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of teamwork interventions that were carried out with the purpose of improving teamwork and team performance, using controlled experimental designs. A literature search returned 16,849 unique articles. The meta-analysis was ultimately conducted on 51 articles, comprising 72 ( k ) unique interventions, 194 effect sizes, and 8439 participants, using a random effects model. Positive and significant medium-sized effects were found for teamwork interventions on both teamwork and team performance. Moderator analyses were also conducted, which generally revealed positive and significant effects with respect to several sample, intervention, and measurement characteristics. Implications for effective teamwork interventions as well as considerations for future research are discussed.

Citation: McEwan D, Ruissen GR, Eys MA, Zumbo BD, Beauchamp MR (2017) The Effectiveness of Teamwork Training on Teamwork Behaviors and Team Performance: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Controlled Interventions. PLoS ONE 12(1): e0169604. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169604

Editor: Nico W. Van Yperen, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, NETHERLANDS

Received: September 15, 2016; Accepted: December 19, 2016; Published: January 13, 2017

Copyright: © 2017 McEwan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Raw data (taken from the studies in our meta-analysis) are available upon request from the corresponding author.

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

From road construction crews and professional soccer squads to political parties and special operations corps, teams have become a ubiquitous part of today’s world. Bringing a group of highly-skilled individuals together is not sufficient for teams to be effective. Rather, team members need to be able to work well together in order for the team to successfully achieve its purposes [ 1 , 2 ]. As a result, there has been a proliferation of research assessing whether, and how, teams can be improved through teamwork training. A wide range of studies have shown positive effects of teamwork interventions for improving team effectiveness across several contexts such as health care (e.g., [ 3 ]), military (e.g., [ 4 ]), aviation (e.g., [ 5 ]), and academic (e.g., [ 6 ]) settings. Similarly, improvements in teamwork have been observed as a result of training with a variety of team types including new teams (e.g., [ 7 ]), intact teams (e.g., [ 8 ]), and those created for laboratory-based experiments (e.g., [ 9 ]). In sum, the extant empirical evidence to date appears to suggest that teams can be improved via teamwork training.

What is Teamwork?

Within teams, members’ behaviors can be categorized in terms of both taskwork and teamwork processes [ 2 ]. Marks et al. [ 10 ] differentiated between the two by suggesting that “taskwork represents what it is that teams are doing, whereas teamwork describes how they are doing it with each other” (p. 357). Specifically, while taskwork involves the execution of core technical competencies within a given domain, teamwork refers to the range of interactive and interdependent behavioral processes among team members that convert team inputs (e.g., member characteristics, organizational funding, team member composition) into outcomes (e.g., team performance, team member satisfaction) [ 2 , 10 ]. Some examples of teamwork (and respective comparisons to taskwork) include: the seamless communication between a surgeon, nurse, and anaesthesiologist, rather than the technical competencies of these practitioners; the synergy between a quarterback and receiver to complete a passing play, rather than their respective skill sets related to throwing or catching a football; the collaborative adjustments a flight crew makes in response to adverse weather or system problems, rather than each individual’s aviation skills; and so forth. Research from an assortment of studies indicates that teamwork—the focus of the current paper—is positively related to important team effectiveness variables, including team performance, group cohesion, collective efficacy, and member satisfaction [ 1 ].

Teamwork has been conceptualized within several theoretical models. For example, in their review, Rousseau et al. [ 2 ] reported that 29 frameworks related to teamwork have been published. Although there is much overlap across these models, there are also some notable differences. These relate to the number of dimensions of teamwork being conceptualized as well as the specific labelling of these dimensions. One thing that is generally agreed upon, however, is that teamwork is comprised of multiple observable and measurable behaviors . For instance, two highly cited frameworks by Marks et al. [ 10 ] and Rousseau et al. [ 2 ] consist of 10 and 14 dimensions of teamwork, respectively. In general, teamwork models focus on behaviors that function to (a) regulate a team’s performance and/or (b) keep the team together. These two components coincide with the two respective processes that Kurt Lewin, the widely recognized father of group dynamics, originally proposed all groups to be involved in: locomotion and maintenance [ 11 ].

With regard to regulating team performance (i.e., locomotion), teamwork behaviors include those that occur (a) before/in preparation for team task performance, (b) during the execution of team performance, and (c) after completing the team task [ 2 ]. First, with regard to teamwork behaviors that occur before/in preparation for team task performance, these include the active process of defining the team’s overall purpose/mission, setting team goals, and formulating action plans/strategies for how goals and broader purposes will be achieved. These behaviors help ensure that all team members are clear in terms of what is required of them in order for the team to function effectively. Second, teamwork behaviors that occur during the execution of team tasks include actions that correspond to members’ communication, coordination, and cooperation with each other. At this stage, team members translate what they have previously planned (during the preparation phase) into action. Third, in terms of teamwork behaviors that occur after completing the team task (i.e., reflection), these include monitoring important situations and conducting post-task appraisals of the team’s performance and system variables (e.g., internal team resources, broader environmental conditions), solving problems that are precluding team goal attainment, making innovative adjustments to the team’s strategy, and providing/receiving verbal and behavioral assistance to/from teammates. Hence, team members determine whether their actions have moved them closer towards accomplishing the team goals and objectives, and whether any modifications are required in order to facilitate future success. In addition to these three dimensions concerned with the regulation of team performance, a fourth dimension of teamwork involves behaviors that function to keep the team together (i.e., maintenance). These behaviors focus on the team’s interpersonal dynamics , and include the management of interpersonal conflict between members and the provision of social support for members experiencing personal difficulties. Managing interpersonal dynamics is critical as it is theorized that teams cannot operate effectively when these issues are present [ 2 ].

How Can Teamwork Be Trained?

Teamwork interventions have utilized a number of training methods in order to target the regulation of team performance (i.e., preparation, execution, reflection) and management of team maintenance (i.e., interpersonal dynamics) dimensions. These intervention strategies generally fall under one of four categories. First, the most basic approach to training and developing teamwork involves providing didactic education to team members in a classroom-type setting, such as lecturing about the importance of providing social support within the team or promoting ways to manage interpersonal conflict among teammates. This type of training has been found to be useful for enhancing team effectiveness (e.g., [ 12 ]). A second category of team training involves utilizing a more interactive workshop-style format, wherein team members take part in various group activities, such as having discussions about the team’s purposes and goals (e.g., [ 13 ]) or working through case studies together (e.g. [ 14 ]). The third broad category of team training involves simulation training, wherein teams experientially enact various teamwork skills, such as interpersonal communication and coordination, in an environment that mimics upcoming team tasks (e.g., airline simulators or medical patient manikins). Although often used as a means of fostering taskwork competencies (e.g., teaching new surgeons how to perform the technical skills of a medical operation), simulation training has been found to be an efficacious approach to teamwork intervention (e.g., [ 15 ]). In addition to these three training approaches that occur outside of the team task environment (i.e., training within classroom and simulation settings), teamwork can also be fostered by incorporating team reviews in-situ (i.e., where the team actually performs its tasks), which allows teams to monitor/review their quality of teamwork on an ongoing basis. These team reviews involve some form of team briefs before (e.g., creating action plans), during (e.g., monitoring team members’ actions), and/or after (e.g., assessing the team’s performance) team task execution, and have also been shown to be efficacious in previous studies (e.g., [ 16 ]).

The effectiveness of teamwork interventions can be determined with an assortment of criteria, including team- and individually-based behaviors, cognitions, and affective states. Hackman and Katz 2010 [ 17 ] posit that team effectiveness can be determined by examining the extent to which the team has achieved its a priori objectives. Since the broad purpose of forming a team is to produce something of value, it is perhaps unsurprising that the most widely tested criterion of team effectiveness has been team performance [ 18 – 20 ]. Thus, although teams come from an array of settings and are idiosyncratic in their own ways, one question that essentially all teams address at some point during their tenure is whether they are performing well. For example, is that road construction crew fixing potholes adequately? Does the local soccer squad have a respectable winning percentage? Has an elected political party successfully completed the tasks for which they campaigned? Did a special operations corps achieve the mission it set out to accomplish? When taken in concert, questions related to team performance are often of central interest when characterizing a team’s effectiveness.

In addition to assessing the outcome variable of team performance, researchers have also been interested in whether teamwork training actually improves teamwork itself. The efficacy of these interventions can be determined with a number of objective (e.g., products produced by an industry team), self-report (e.g., questionnaires regarding perceived social support amongst team members), and third-party assessments (e.g., expert ratings of team behaviors). Both general/omnibus measures of teamwork (e.g., [ 21 ]) as well as those assessing specific dimensions of teamwork (e.g., communication [ 22 ]) have been operationalized to examine the effectiveness of these interventions. For example, do team goal setting activities actually result in members creating and pursuing effective team goals? Does simulation training improve the requisite coordination processes among aviation cockpit crews? Has a didactic lecture contributed to improved conflict management among team members? Answering these types of questions is important for determining whether an intervention is actually efficacious in changing the variable that is targeted for improvement (i.e., teamwork behaviors).

The Current Review

Prior to outlining the purposes of this systematic review, it is important to recognize that previous quantitative reviews have been conducted that addressed—to some degree—teamwork training. In preparation for this systematic review, we conducted a scoping review which revealed that eight previous meta-analyses have assessed teamwork intervention studies in some way. However, these reviews were delimited based on various sample and/or intervention characteristics. For example, some reviews included studies that were only conducted with certain team types (e.g., intact teams [ 23 ]) or within a particular context (e.g., sports [ 24 ]; medical teams [ 25 ]). Others were delimited to specific training programs/strategies that were restricted to a narrow range of teamwork strategies (e.g., [ 23 , 25 – 29 ]). Finally, studies that used a combination of teamwork and taskwork intervention components have been systematically reviewed [ 30 ]; however, these types of interventions result in a limited ability to determine the extent to which the resulting effects were due to teamwork training versus taskwork training.

It should also be noted that all but one [ 23 ] of these previous reviews pooled together studies that included a control condition (i.e., wherein teams do not receive any type of teamwork training) and those that did not (as mentioned above, that study only analyzed the effects of certain teamwork strategies). This is an important consideration, as it has been suggested that controlled and uncontrolled studies should not be combined into the same meta-analysis due to differences in study quality (which is a major source of heterogeneity) and since stronger conclusions can be derived from controlled interventions compared to uncontrolled interventions (e.g., [ 31 ]). Therefore, while previous systematic reviews have provided valuable contributions to the teamwork literature, a systematic review that assesses the effects of controlled teamwork interventions across a range of contexts, team types, and involving those that targeted diverse dimensions of teamwork appears warranted. In doing so, a more comprehensive assessment of the efficacy of these teamwork interventions is provided, while also having the capacity to look at the potential moderating effects of various sample, intervention, and measurement characteristics. Moreover, by including only controlled studies, one is able to make stronger conclusions regarding the observed effects.

The overall purpose of this study was to better understand the utility of teamwork training for enhancing team effectiveness. Specifically, a meta-analysis was conducted on controlled studies (i.e., comparing teams who have received teamwork training with those who have not) that have examined the effects of teamwork interventions on teamwork processes and/or team performance. To better disentangle the effectiveness of these studies, we also sought to assess potential moderators of these main effects; that is, to determine whether there are certain conditions under which the independent variable of teamwork training more strongly (or weakly) causally influences the dependent variables of teamwork behaviors or team performance [ 32 ]. The specific moderators that we assessed included: (a) the team context/field of study, (b) the type of teams that were trained, (c) the primary type of intervention method employed, (d) the dimensions of teamwork that were targeted in the intervention, (e) the number of dimensions targeted, (f) the types of measures used to quantify the training effects, and (g) in studies where teamwork was assessed as an outcome variable, the dimensions of teamwork that were measured. It was hypothesized that teamwork training would have a positive and significant effect on both teamwork and team performance and that these effects would be evident across a range of the aforementioned sample, intervention, and measurement characteristics/conditions.

Literature Search

Searches for potential articles were conducted in the following databases: PsycInfo , Medline , Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials , SportDiscus , and ProQuest Dissertations and Theses . Hand searches were also conducted across thirteen journals that typically publish articles on group dynamics (e.g., Group Dynamics : Theory , Research , and Practice ; Small Group Research , Journal of Applied Psychology ; Personnel Psychology , Human Factors ; Academy of Management Journal , Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology ). In each database and journal search, the following combination of search terms were used: ( team OR interprofessional OR interdisciplinary ) AND ( intervention OR training OR building OR simulation ) AND ( teamwork OR mission analysis OR goal specification OR goal setting OR planning OR strategy OR coordination OR cooperation OR communication OR information exchange OR information sharing OR monitoring OR problem solving OR backing up OR coaching OR innovation OR adaptability OR feedback OR support OR conflict management OR situation awareness OR confidence building OR affect management ). These terms were based on various models of teamwork that exist within the literature (see Rousseau et al. [ 2 ] for an overview of these models). An additional search was conducted within these databases and journals using the search terms ( TeamSTEPPS OR Crew Resource Management OR SBAR [Situation-Background-Assessment-Recommendation]), as several articles in the initial search used these specific training programs. We also searched the reference sections of the articles from past teamwork training review papers as well as from articles that initially met inclusion criteria to determine if any additional articles could be retrieved. The searches were conducted in September 2015 and no time limits were placed on the search strategy. Each article was first subjected to title elimination, then abstract elimination, and finally full-text elimination.

Eligibility Criteria

To be included in the meta-analysis, a study needed to examine the effects of teamwork training by comparing teams in an experimental condition (i.e., those who received teamwork training) with those in a control condition (i.e., where teams did not receive teamwork training). Cross-sectional/non-experimental studies were excluded, as were intervention studies that did not include a control condition. As this review was only concerned with teamwork interventions, studies that focused on training taskwork—whether independent of, or in addition to, a teamwork intervention—were excluded. For example, as previously mentioned, simulation-based training (SBT) has been used as a means of training individuals to perform technical skills and also to enhance teamwork. In order for a SBT intervention to be included in this meta-analysis, it had to be clear that only teamwork (not technical skills) was being targeted during training. In order to address our primary research question, the study had to provide data on at least one teamwork dimension and/or team performance. The study also needed to provide sufficient statistics to compute an effect size. In cases of insufficient data, corresponding authors were contacted for this information. The articles were delimited to those published in the English language.

Data Analysis

Articles that met the aforementioned eligibility criteria were extracted for effect sizes and coded independently with respect to seven moderators by two of the authors (DM and GR). Interrater reliability for the coding of these moderators was over 90%, kappa (SE) = 0.80 (0.01). The moderators examined were based on a scoping review (the purpose of which included identifying pertinent characteristics that were commonly reported in previous teamwork intervention research), which was conducted in preparation for this systematic review. The moderators that were examined in this review included (1) the context within which an intervention was conducted ( health care , aviation , military , academia , industry , or laboratory experiment) , (2) the type of team targeted ( intact or new ), (3) the primary training method applied to conduct the intervention ( didactic education , workshop , simulation , or team reviews ), (4) the dimension(s) of teamwork ( preparation , execution , reflection , and/or interpersonal dynamics ) targeted in the intervention as well as (5) the number of dimensions targeted (between one and four), (6) the type of measure used to derive effect sizes ( self-report , third party , or objective measures ), and—when teamwork was assessed as the criterion variable—(7) the specific dimension(s) of teamwork that were measured ( general , preparation , execution , reflection , and interpersonal dynamics ).

Once coded, data were entered into the software Comprehensive Meta-Analysis , Version 2 [ 33 ] and analyzed as a random-effects model (DerSimonian and Laird approach). This type of model assumes that there is heterogeneity in the effect sizes across the included studies and is the appropriate model to use in social science research, as opposed to a fixed-effects model (which assumes that effect sizes do not vary from study to study) [ 34 , 35 ]. Where possible, effect sizes for each study were derived from means, standard deviations, and sample sizes at baseline and post-intervention [ 34 , 36 ]. If these statistics were not fully provided, they were supplemented with F -statistics, t scores, correlations, and p -values to compute the effect size. Each study was given a relative weight based on its precision, which is determined by the study’s sample size, standard error, and confidence interval (i.e., the more precise the data, the larger the relative study weight) [ 34 ].

In instances where a study provided data to calculate multiple effect sizes (such as when several measures of the criterion variable—teamwork or team performance—were examined), these effects were combined into one overall effect size statistic (i.e., a weighted average) for that study. This was done to ensure that those studies that had multiple measures of teamwork or team performance were not given greater weight compared to studies that only provided one effect size (i.e., only had one measure of performance or teamwork), which could potentially skew the overall results [ 34 ]. The exception to this was when articles reported the effects of more than one intervention (i.e., had multiple experimental conditions), each of which had a unique teamwork training protocol. In these cases, an effect size from each intervention was computed. Thus, these articles would contribute multiple effect sizes to the total number of comparisons within the meta-analysis. To correct for potential unit-of-analysis errors in these particular articles, the sample size of the control condition was divided by the number of within-study comparisons [ 31 ]. For example, if three different types of teamwork interventions were compared to one control condition (e.g., which had a sample size of 30 participants), the n of the control condition was divided by 3 (i.e., 30/3 = 10) when calculating the effect sizes of those interventions. Cohen’s d was used as the effect size metric to represent the standardized effect (i.e., the average magnitude of effectiveness) of teamwork interventions on teamwork and team performance [ 37 ]. Standard errors and 95% confidence intervals were computed to test for the accuracy of the standardized effects obtained.

To reduce heterogeneity and improve the interpretability of the results, we pooled studies into those that measured teamwork as its criterion variable and those that measured team performance. Pooling studies in this manner not only reduces heterogeneity but also allowed us to identify the extent to which teamwork interventions impact team performance and, separately, the extent to which they affect teamwork processes. Heterogeneity within the meta-analysis was also assessed by computing a Q value—which estimates the variability in the observed effect sizes across studies—and an I 2 statistic—which estimates the ratio of the true heterogeneity to the total observed variation across studies. High Q and I 2 statistics can be problematic for interpreting the results of a meta-analysis and can also indicate that the meta-analysis includes outlier studies. We also planned to identify and exclude outliers from subsequent moderator analyses in two ways. First, sensitivity analyses were carried out by removing a single intervention from the meta-analysis and noting the resulting effect size—this estimates the impact that each individual intervention has on the overall effect size of teamwork or team performance. If the resulting effect size with an intervention removed (i.e., K– 1) is substantially different than the effect size with that intervention present, this may suggest that it is an outlier and needs to be removed [ 34 ]. Second, we noted any studies that had abnormally high effect sizes and standardized residuals (above 3.0), especially when these values were accompanied by narrow confidence intervals. If heterogeneity ( Q and I 2 ) is substantially reduced upon removal of a study, this further confirms that the study is an outlier and should be omitted from subsequent subgroup/moderator analyses.

Once the two pools of studies were produced, bias within each pool was assessed. First, publication bias was examined by calculating a fail-safe N statistic, which estimates the number of unpublished studies with null findings that would have to exist to reduce the obtained effect size to zero [ 38 ]. If this number is sufficiently large—Rosenberg [ 39 ] recommends a critical value of 5 N +10—then the probability of such a number of studies existing is considered to be low. For example, if 20 studies were included in a meta-analysis, then the resulting fail-safe N should be larger than 110 (i.e., 5*20 + 10); if this value was not larger than 110, then publication bias is likely within this pool of studies. We also obtained two funnel plots (one for studies where teamwork was the outcome variable and one for team performance as the outcome) to provide a visual depiction of potential publication bias. We then conducted an Egger’s test as a measure of symmetry for these two funnel plots. If this test statistic is significant ( p < 0.05), this denotes that the distribution around the effect size is asymmetric and publication bias is likely present [ 34 ].

The literature search from the five databases returned 22,066 articles, while the hand searches of the 13 journals returned 3797 articles, vetting of studies from previous team training reviews returned 191 articles, and the ancestry search of reference lists returned 471 articles (see Fig 1 ). After removing duplicates, 16,849 articles were subject to title and abstract screening, where they were dichotomously coded as ‘potentially relevant’ or ‘clearly not relevant’. 1517 potentially relevant articles were then full-text reviewed and coded as meeting eligibility criteria or as ineligible for the following reasons: (1) not a teamwork intervention; (2) teamwork-plus-taskwork intervention; (3) insufficient statistics to compute an effect size; (4) not including a measure of teamwork or team performance; or (5) not including a control group. As a result of this eligibility coding, 51 articles were included in the meta-analysis. 13 of these studies reported results on two or more interventions, bringing the total number of comparisons ( k ) to 72 with 8439 participants (4966 experimental, 3473 control). See S1 Table for descriptions of each study with regard to study context, type of team and participants, targeted teamwork dimensions of the intervention, number of effect sizes, the criteria measured, and an overview of the intervention.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169604.g001

Summary Statistics

Results of the overall effect of teamwork interventions on teamwork processes along with summary statistics and sensitivity analyses (i.e., the final column marked ‘ES with study removed’) for this pool of studies are presented in Table 1 . This pool included a total of 39 interventions from 33 studies. The results revealed that teamwork interventions had a significant, medium-to-large effect on teamwork, d ( SE ) = 0.683 (0.13), 95% CI = 0.43–0.94, Z = 5.23, p < 0.001; Q ( df ) = 660.7 (38), I 2 = 94.2. The funnel plot for this pool of studies is shown in Fig 2 . The fail-safe N was 3598, which is sufficiently large, as it exceeds the critical value of 205 (5*39+10). The funnel plot for this pool of studies is presented in Fig 2 . Egger’s value for this funnel plot was not significant ( B = 0.364, SE = 1.30, 95% CI = -2.26–2.99, t = 0.28, p = 0.78), which also suggests that bias was not present. Two studies were identified as outliers within this pool of studies: Morey et al. [ 3 ] and Marshall et al. [ 22 ]. The resulting effect size when these studies were excluded was d (SE) = 0.550 (0.08), 95% CI = 0.39–0.71, Z = 6.73, p < 0.001; Q ( df ) = 187.53 (36), I 2 = 80.8. Subsequent moderator analyses were conducted with these two outlier studies being omitted.

Circles filled with black indicate outlier studies.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169604.g002

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169604.t001

Results of the overall effect of teamwork interventions on team performance as well as summary statistics and sensitivity analyses (i.e., the final column marked ‘ES with intervention removed’) for this pool of studies are presented in Table 2 . This pool of studies included a total of 50 interventions from 32 studies. It was shown that teamwork interventions had a significant, large effect on team performance— d ( SE ) = 0.919 (0.14), 95% CI = 0.65–1.19, Z = 6.72, p < 0.001; Q ( df ) = 851.3 (49), I 2 = 94.2. The funnel plot for this pool of studies is shown in Fig 3 . The fail-safe N was 6692, which is sufficiently large, as it exceeds the critical value of 260 (5*50+10). The funnel plot for this pool of studies is presented in Fig 3 . Egger’s value for this funnel plot was not significant ( B = 0.131, SE = 1.19, 95% CI = -2.26–2.54, t = 0.11, p = 0.91), which also implies that bias was not present. There were five outlier interventions (from four studies) in this pool of studies that assessed team performance: Morey et al. [ 3 ], Smith-Jentsch et al. [ 4 ], one of the interventions from Buller and Bell [ 63 ]; teambuilding condition), and both interventions from Bushe and Coetzer [ 43 ]. When these outliers were removed, the resulting effect size was d ( SE ) = 0.582 (0.06), 95% CI = 0.47–0.69, Z = 10.30, p < 0.001; Q ( df ) = 101.1 (44), I 2 = 56.5. Subsequent moderator analyses were conducted with these five interventions omitted.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169604.g003

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169604.t002

Moderator Analyses

The results of the moderator analyses are shown in Table 3 (for teamwork behaviors) and Table 4 (for team performance). With respect to sample characteristics, significant positive effects of teamwork interventions were found for enhancing teamwork across all contexts ( d s = 0.46–1.23) except for the single effect size from an industry setting ( d = 0.50). In terms of team performance, significant effects were evident across all settings ( d s = 0.40–1.76). In addition, interventions were effective for enhancing teamwork with intact teams ( d = 0.33) and newly-formed teams ( d = 0.67), with the effect size for new teams being significantly larger ( Q = 4.04, p = 0.004) than that for existing teams. Teamwork training was also effective at fostering team performance for both team types; however, in contrast to the findings on teamwork, the effect size for intact teams ( d = 0.99) was significantly larger ( Q = 6.04, p = 0.02) than that for new teams ( d = 0.54).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169604.t003

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169604.t004

Three intervention characteristics were analyzed as potential moderators. First, with regard to the intervention method utilized, significant effects on teamwork were found for workshop training ( d = 0.50), simulation-based teamwork training ( d = 0.78), and team reviews ( d = 0.64) but not for didactic education ( d = 0.19). All training methods were effective for enhancing team performance ( d s = 0.41–0.69). Second, significant effects of training on teamwork were evident when two or more dimensions of teamwork were targeted ( d s = 0.65–0.98) but not when only one dimension was targeted ( d = 0.05). Team performance, however, improved significantly as a result of teamwork training regardless of the number of teamwork dimensions that were targeted ( d s = 0.46–0.67). Third, significant effects were shown regardless of which dimension (i.e., preparation, execution, reflection, interpersonal dynamics) was targeted for both teamwork ( d s = 0.64–0.75) and team performance ( d s = 0.52–0.60).

With regard to measurement characteristics, significant improvements on teamwork emerged when either third-party ( d = 0.80) or self-report ( d = 0.38) measures of teamwork were utilized; the effect size for third-party measures was significantly larger ( Q = 6.02, p = 0.014) than the effect size for self-report measures. For team performance outcomes, significant effects were shown for both objective ( d = 0.61) and third-party measures ( d = 0.56). Finally, significant effects on teamwork were found when general/omnibus measures of teamwork were taken ( d = 0.71), as well as when a specific dimension of teamwork was measured ( d s = 0.45–0.70).

The purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to quantify the effects of the extant controlled experimental research of teamwork training interventions on teamwork and team performance. We found positive and significant medium-to-large sized effects for these interventions on teamwork and large effects on team performance. When outlier studies were removed, medium-sized effects were found for both criteria. Additional subgroup/moderator analyses also revealed several notable findings, each of which will be discussed in turn. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limitations associated with this meta-analysis as well as considerations for future teamwork training research.

Who Can Benefit From Teamwork Training?

With regard to sample characteristics, teamwork interventions were shown to be effective at enhancing both teamwork and team performance across a variety of team contexts, including laboratory settings as well as real-world contexts of health care, aviation, military, and academia. This highlights the efficacy of teamwork training as a means of improving teams; this is an important finding as effective teams (i.e., those that work well together and perform at a high level) are vital in many of the aforementioned contexts. For example, it has been estimated that approximately 70% of adverse events in medical settings are not due to individuals’ technical errors but, rather, as a result of breakdowns in teamwork [ 78 ]. Thus, there is a critical need to ensure that teams are effective across these settings, as these teams greatly impact (among other things) the welfare of others. The results of this meta-analysis suggest that teamwork training can indeed be a useful way of enhancing team effectiveness within these contexts.

We also examined whether there were differential effects of teamwork training for new teams compared to intact teams. It was shown that these interventions were effective for both team types. The effects of teamwork training on teamwork outcomes were significantly larger for new teams (who showed a medium-to-large effect size) compared to existing teams (who had a small-to-medium effect size). Interestingly, when we examined team performance as the criterion variable, the training effects were significantly larger for intact teams (who showed a large effect size) compared to newly-formed teams (who again showed a medium-to-large effect size). It should be noted that there were many more studies conducted with new teams compared to intact teams—thus, caution should be exercised in directly comparing these findings. Nonetheless, at this point, the existing research seems to suggest that teamwork interventions work particularly well at enhancing teamwork processes for newly established teams—and also work with existing teams—but not the same extent. It is possible that teamwork processes might be more malleable and display greater potential for improvement with new teams compared to more established teams whose teamwork processes may be more entrenched. On the other hand, it is notable that the effects of teamwork training on team performance were stronger for established teams. In line with this, it is plausible that, while intact teams may show less pronounced changes in teamwork, they might be better able to translate their teamwork training into improved team performance outcomes.

What Type of Training Works?

Three moderator variables were assessed with regard to intervention characteristics. First, with regard to the training method utilized, it was shown that all four training methods were effective for enhancing team performance. These included the provision of didactic lectures/presentations, workshops, simulation training, and review-type activities conducted in situ. Although significant effects were shown for the latter three training methods for teamwork outcomes, those interventions that targeted didactic instruction did not result in significant improvements in teamwork itself. This suggests that simply providing educational lectures wherein team members passively learn about teamwork is not an effective way of improving teamwork. When taken together these findings suggest that teamwork training should incorporate experiential activities that provide participants with more active ways of learning and practising teamwork. These may include various workshop-style exercises that involve all team members, such as working through case studies of how teams can improve teamwork, watching and critiquing video vignettes of teams displaying optimal versus suboptimal teamwork, discussing and setting teamwork-related goals and action plans, or other activities that help stimulate critical thinking and active learning of effective teamwork. Teams may also find it useful to conduct simulations of specific team tasks that the group is likely to encounter in-situ, such as aviation teams using an airplane simulator, surgical teams conducting mock-surgeries on medical manikins, military teams practising various field missions, and so on. Teamwork can be also fostered by having team members participate in team reviews/briefings before, during, and/or after the execution of team tasks that occur in-situ. In summary, simply lecturing about the importance of teamwork is not sufficient to create meaningful improvements in teamwork; rather, substantive positive effects can be derived by having team members engage in activities that require them to actively learn about and practise teamwork.

We also sought to assess how comprehensive an intervention should be—specifically, the number of teamwork dimensions that need to be targeted—in order to be effective. With regard to improving team performance, there were significant effects when one or more dimensions were targeted. However, in terms of improving teamwork behaviors, significant effects only emerged when two or more dimensions were targeted. From an applied perspective, individuals concerned with intervention (e.g., team consultants, coaches, managers, team leaders) can utilize these findings by targeting more than one dimension of teamwork within their training protocol. For instance, if the purpose of an intervention is to improve a health care team’s communication, greater effects may be derived by not merely targeting communication during the execution phase alone (e.g., with a structured communication tool), but by also incorporating strategies that target other dimensions of teamwork, such as setting goals and action plans for how communication will be improved (i.e., the preparation dimension of teamwork) as well as monitoring progress towards those goals, resolving any communication-related problems that arise, and making adjustments to action plans as necessary (i.e., the reflection dimension).

Relatedly, we sought to address whether there were differential effects of teamwork interventions on teamwork and team performance based on the dimensions of teamwork that were targeted. It was found that interventions had a significant effect on both teamwork behaviors and team performance when any dimension of teamwork was targeted. This is important as it means that if those concerned with intervention target any one of the four dimensions of teamwork, this will likely result in improvements in team functioning. While the preparation (i.e., behaviors occurring before team task performance such as setting goals and action plans), execution (i.e., intra-task behaviors such as communication and coordination), and reflection (i.e., behaviors occurring following task performance such as performance monitoring and problem solving) dimensions have each been theorized to be implicated in fostering team performance [ 2 , 79 ], is particularly noteworthy that interventions targeting the interpersonal dynamics of a team (i.e., managing interpersonal conflict and the provision of social support between members) also displayed significant effects in relation to team performance. Specifically, efforts to enhance interpersonal processes have generally been theorized to be related to supporting team maintenance more so than supporting team performance [ 2 , 79 ]. However, the results from the current review provide evidence that training teams with regard to social support and interpersonal conflict management processes may actually be a useful way to enhance team performance. While the exact reason for this effect is not immediately clear from this review, it may be that improving interpersonal dynamics has an indirect relationship with team performance. That is, teamwork training focused on improving social support and conflict management may improve the functioning of a team, which, in turn, improves the team’s performance. As Marks et al. [ 10 ] contend, these interpersonal processes “lay the foundation for the effectiveness of other processes” (p. 368). Relatedly, Rousseau et al. [ 2 ] suggest that problems related to social support and conflict management “may prevent team members from fully contributing to task accomplishment or from effectively regulating team performance” (p. 557). Further research examining this potential relationship is required as this would have implications in both research and applied teamwork settings.

Does It Matter How Criterion Variables Are Measured?

Two measurement characteristics were examined as moderators within this meta-analysis. First, significant, large- and small-to-medium sized effects were found for third party and self-report measures of teamwork, respectively. Significant medium effects were also evident for third party and objective measures of team performance. It is worth noting that significantly larger effect sizes emerged for third party assessments of teamwork compared to self-report measures. Taken together, these findings suggest that the positive effects that were found for teamwork interventions are not merely perceptive and/or due to individuals’ self-report biases (i.e., social desirability). Rather, these results indicate that the effects of these interventions on both teamwork and team performance are clearly observable with measures beyond self-report indices.

Finally, we sought to assess whether the effects of teamwork training varied based on which teamwork dimension(s) were measured. Medium-to-large effects emerged when general/omnibus measures of teamwork—that is, those that provided an overall score of teamwork as opposed to examining individual dimensions of teamwork—were taken. Measures that tapped into the specific dimensions of teamwork (e.g., those that provided individual scores on preparation, execution, reflection, and interpersonal dynamics) also yielded comparable effect sizes. Hence, teamwork interventions appear to have a somewhat similar effect on each of the components of teamwork. In summary, the results of the above two moderators (i.e., type of measure and dimension of teamwork examined) suggest that teamwork training has a positive impact on teamwork and team performance regardless of the way in which these variables are assessed.

Limitations

Despite the contributions of this meta-analytic review, it is not without limitations. First, there were additional variables that we had planned to analyze as moderators a priori including team size and length of/contact time within the intervention. However, there was an insufficient amount of reliable data across the studies on these variables to conduct these subgroup analyses appropriately. For instance, although many studies noted the total number of participants within an organization (e.g., a hospital) that took part in an intervention, information on the size of the teams within the organization (e.g., various units within the hospital) was often missing. Team composition variables such as this have been noted as important factors to take into account when examining teams (e.g., [ 30 , 80 ]). Similarly, although some studies were explicit about the total length of the intervention and the contact time between interventionists and participating teams, this information was not provided consistently. This too would have been a valuable feature to analyze in order to provide more specific recommendations about how teamwork training programs should be designed—that is, how long an intervention should last? Unfortunately, due to the paucity of information available in the included manuscripts, we were unable to determine whether these variables moderated the observed effects of teamwork training on teamwork and team performance in the current meta-analysis.

Furthermore, there was a considerable amount of variability within some of the moderator categories that were coded. For instance, with regard to intervention methods, ‘workshops’ consisted of many different types of activities including team charter sessions, strategy planning meetings, case study activities, and so on. Combining these activities into one category was done for the sake of being adequately powered to conduct moderator analyses (i.e., include a sufficient number of studies within each of the resulting categories). However, while the above examples are indeed activities that teams do together, they are of course each different in their own ways. Hence, although it is evident that workshop-type activities are effective overall, it is unclear if specific workshop activities are more effective than others. This example underscores the difficulty that can occur when trying to balance statistical power with accuracy for each moderator category when conducting subgroup analyses in a meta-analysis.

Relatedly, effect sizes were only computed with the statistics that were provided from baseline and post-intervention, even if studies provided additional data on teamwork and/or performance at some other point in between or at a follow-up point in time (although it is worth noting that relatively few studies actually did this). This was done in order to minimize heterogeneity within the meta-analysis and improve the interpretability of the results (i.e., determining the effects of teamwork training from pre- to post-intervention). However, by not taking these measurement time-points into consideration, two questions in particular are raised. First, do certain dimensions of teamwork and team performance evolve differently over time and, if so, how? For instance, do improvements in teamwork occur immediately in response to training and then plateau; or do they improve in a slower, more linear fashion from the onset of training? Second, what are the long-term implications of teamwork training? That is, does teamwork training result in sustained improvements in teamwork and team performance beyond the intervention period or do these effects eventually wane? Answers to these types of research questions would certainly be of interest to teamwork researchers and applied practitioners.

Future Directions

In addition to summarizing the previous research on teamwork interventions for improving teamwork and team performance, the findings from this systematic review also highlight several potential avenues of future research. First, with regard to sample characteristics, the majority of studies that examined the effects of teamwork interventions on team performance were conducted within laboratory settings, with relatively fewer controlled studies having been conducted in real-world settings. Thus, although significant effects on team performance (and teamwork) were found in health care, aviation, military, and academic settings, the extant literature would be strengthened by conducting further controlled intervention research within these contexts. It was also shown that teamwork training was less effective for improving teamwork for intact teams compared to new teams. Since many teams seeking teamwork training are likely to be intact, it is important that future research continue to test various training strategies that can be utilized with these types of teams. In addition, there are other contexts in which controlled interventions have not yet been conducted such as with police squads, firefighting crews, sports teams, political parties, and so on. Research in these areas is clearly ripe for future inquiry.

Further research on the ideal combination of teamwork dimensions (i.e., preparation and/or execution and/or reflection and/or interpersonal dynamics) targeted in an intervention would also enhance our current knowledge in terms of how to train teamwork most effectively and efficiently. We had originally planned to further assess this moderator by conducting a method co-occurrence analysis [ 81 ]. Specifically, since there would likely be a variety of combinations of dimensions that were targeted in the teamwork interventions (e.g., preparation only; preparation and execution; preparation, execution, reflection, and interpersonal dynamics; etc), we had hoped to examine if there would be differential effects of these combinations with regard to intervention effectiveness. Unfortunately, since there were such a large number of combinations of dimensions targeted in the included studies, there was an insufficient number of interventions that fell into each category. We were, therefore, unable to pursue this method co-occurrence analysis [ 81 ] of the various combinations of dimensions. Thus, although our findings suggest that interventions are more effective when two or more dimensions are targeted, further research that examines the effects of the ideal combinations of these dimensions would certainly enhance our current knowledge of teamwork training. For example, if the objective of teamwork training is to improve the coordination and cooperation of the team, should the training also target (in addition to targeting these execution behaviors) both the preparation and reflection dimensions of training (or simply one or the other)? Answering such complex questions will help to advance our understanding of what makes for an effective teamwork training program.

Balanced against the contributions and insights provided by the various moderator analyses conducted in this study, the overall take-home message is that teamwork training is an effective way to foster teamwork and team performance. These effects appear to be evident across a range of samples, utilizing numerous intervention methods, and when considering various measurement characteristics. Interventions appear to be particularly effective when they target multiple dimensions of teamwork and include experiential activities for team members to actively learn about, practise, and continually develop teamwork.

Supporting Information

S1 table. summaries of interventions..

Summaries of each study and intervention included in the meta-analysis is provided in the S1 Table.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169604.s001

S1 File. PRISMA Checklist.

The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) Checklist [ 82 ] for this review is presented in the S1 File.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169604.s002

Author Contributions

• Conceptualization: DM ME BZ MB.
• Data curation: DM.
• Formal analysis: DM.
• Investigation: DM GR.
• Methodology: DM MB.
• Project administration: DM MB.
• Resources: DM MB.
• Supervision: MB.
• Validation: DM GR MB.
• Visualization: DM GR ME BZ MB.
• Writing – original draft: DM MB.
• Writing – review & editing: DM GR ME BZ MB.
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The Secrets of Great Teamwork

• Martine Haas
• Mark Mortensen

Over the years, as teams have grown more diverse, dispersed, digital, and dynamic, collaboration has become more complex. But though teams face new challenges, their success still depends on a core set of fundamentals. As J. Richard Hackman, who began researching teams in the 1970s, discovered, what matters most isn’t the personalities or behavior of the team members; it’s whether a team has a compelling direction, a strong structure, and a supportive context. In their own research, Haas and Mortensen have found that teams need those three “enabling conditions” now more than ever. But their work also revealed that today’s teams are especially prone to two corrosive problems: “us versus them” thinking and incomplete information. Overcoming those pitfalls requires a new enabling condition: a shared mindset.

This article details what team leaders should do to establish the four foundations for success. For instance, to promote a shared mindset, leaders should foster a common identity and common understanding among team members, with techniques such as “structured unstructured time.” The authors also describe how to evaluate a team’s effectiveness, providing an assessment leaders can take to see what’s working and where there’s room for improvement.

Collaboration has become more complex, but success still depends on the fundamentals.

Idea in Brief

The problem.

Teams are more diverse, dispersed, digital, and dynamic than ever before. These qualities make collaboration especially challenging.

The Analysis

Mixing new insights with a focus on the fundamentals of team effectiveness identified by organizational-behavior pioneer J. Richard Hackman, managers should work to establish the conditions that will enable teams to thrive.

The Solution

The right conditions are

• a compelling direction
• a strong structure
• a supportive context, and
• a shared mindset

Weaknesses in these areas make teams vulnerable to problems.

Today’s teams are different from the teams of the past: They’re far more diverse, dispersed, digital, and dynamic (with frequent changes in membership). But while teams face new hurdles, their success still hinges on a core set of fundamentals for group collaboration.

• Martine Haas is the Lauder Chair Professor of Management at the Wharton School and Director of the Lauder Institute for Management & International Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a PhD from Harvard University. Her research focuses on collaboration and teamwork in global organizations.
• Mark Mortensen is a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD and for over 20 years has studied and consulted on collaboration and organization design, with a focus on hybrid, virtual, and globally distributed work. Mark publishes regularly in Harvard Business Review , MIT Sloan Management Review , and INSEAD Knowledge, and is a regular fixture in popular press outlets like the BBC, the Economist , the Financial Times , and Fortune .

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Cover Story

What makes teams work?

Psychologists are pinpointing the factors that make teams gel—research that has far-reaching implications for health care, education, research, industry and more

By Kirsten Weir

September 2018, Vol 49, No. 8

Print version: page 46

15 min read

• Healthy Workplaces

The lone wolf is becoming an endangered species. In fields from health care to hospitality, startups to big business, teamwork has become the favored way to get things done. "The world is so complex, no one person has the skills or knowledge to accomplish all that we want to accomplish," says Susan McDaniel, PhD, a psychologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center and 2016 APA president known for her dedication to team-based work. "Interdisciplinary teams are the way to make that happen."

While humans have always joined forces with one another to achieve shared goals, psychologists are zeroing in on the methods and processes that make those collaborations more efficient and successful. "What's changing is the understanding and appreciation that there is a science behind how to manage teams," says Suzanne Bell, PhD, an associate professor of industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology at DePaul University in Chicago.

Now, a special issue of American Psychologist (Vol. 73, No. 4, 2018) details what psychologists have learned—and need to learn—about working in teams. "The Science of Teamwork," co-edited by McDaniel and colleague Eduardo Salas, PhD, of Rice University in Houston, in cooperation with American Psychologist editor-in-chief Anne E. Kazak, PhD, offers 21 articles that delve into the theory, research and applications of team science.

Here, we look at some of the most significant findings in the special issue, particularly the ways that team processes matter for psychologists, whether they're working in health care, research, industry, the military or education.

Building a dream team

Sometimes teams seem to click without too much effort, working together seamlessly and producing great work as a result. Other collaborations crash and burn. A team's success often depends on its composition, as Bell and her co-authors describe in their contribution to the special issue.

Surface-level attributes of individual team members—such as age, gender and reputation—can be important to the team's overall function, but they aren't necessarily the factors that matter most, Bell says. Instead, it's the "deep-level" factors you can't see at a glance, such as the members' personality traits, values and abilities, that tend to have a much bigger impact on work teams, studies suggest.

Those deep-level factors shape what researchers call the ABCs of teamwork: the attitudes, behaviors and cognitive states that collectively influence whether a team achieves its goals. Those elements depend to some degree on the context and on the team's objectives, Bell says. If the goal is to design an innovative new digital device, it's a good idea to build a team with diverse thinkers who bring a range of knowledge, skills and abilities to the project. But if a team's goal is to be more efficient, diverse attitudes might be less critical.

Team success also hinges on some basic tenets of team composition, say Bell and her co-authors. One person's mood and outlook can spread within a team, so a pessimistic team member could negatively influence the way the whole group views its goals. Individuals who value working in groups tend to be both more confident and more cooperative in a team setting. When team members are high in conscientiousness, they are better at self-regulating their teamwork. And groups composed of high-ability members who are able to learn, reason, adapt and solve problems are more likely to work well together.

Researchers are working to design algorithms that help organizations create effective teams for specific goals. In a project with NASA, for instance, Bell and colleagues are developing algorithms to identify crew members suited to working together on long-distance space missions.

Ultimately, such tools can help organizations create the best possible teams from the outset and tailor interventions for the unique needs of a team with a specific composition. "Teams are complex systems," Bell says. "The more you can manage them using a scientific basis, the better your teams will be."

The secret sauce: Cooperation in the military

Using scientific methods to understand teams isn't a new trend. Military researchers have been studying teamwork systematically for more than half a century, as Gerald F. Goodwin, PhD, of the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, and colleagues describe in an article in the special issue. "The military has been really central in supporting and executing research on teams since the 1950s," he says. "That support has been critical to moving this science forward."

That distinction might seem obvious, says Goodwin, but understanding the elements that allow teams to function well—team cohesion and shared mental models, for example—is important for training teams as well as evaluating their performance. "How well people work together may be more important than how well they work on the tasks," he says. "The secret sauce comes from the teamwork."

Research from military settings has also clarified the importance of team cognition—what teams think, how they think together and how well synchronized their beliefs and perceptions are. Team cognition is what allows team members to understand intuitively how their teammates will think and act, whether on the battlefield, in a surgical suite or on a basketball court. "Team cognition is really important for teams that have to quickly adapt to dynamic circumstances without having the opportunity to communicate a lot," Goodwin says.

Many of the empirical findings from military research apply to civilian teams as well. From the earliest studies, military and civilian researchers have openly shared findings and worked together to grow the science of teamwork, Goodwin says. The military, for instance, has made use of results from team research in aviation. Meanwhile, findings from military-funded research have informed processes in many industries, health care in particular.

Teaming up for better health

Teams in the military and in health care share an important commonality: They can be operating in situations in which team coordination can be a matter of life or death. Some of the earlier research on health-care teams focused on hospital settings, where teamwork failures can lead to patient harms such as misdiagnoses, medication mistakes, surgical errors and hospital-acquired infections. In a paper for the special issue, Michael Rosen, PhD, an associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and colleagues describe how medical team coordination affects patient safety and the quality of patient care.

Unlike teams in a business setting that might collaborate with one another for months at a time, health-care teams are often fluid, especially in hospitals. Medical personnel including physicians, nurses, surgical assistants and pharmacists might have to jump into a new care team at each shift change or for each new patient. The fundamentals of good collaboration are the same no matter how transient the team, Rosen says: "It's about having clear roles, clear goals and a clear plan of care."

Teams are also becoming increasingly important in primary-care settings. "I think the industry is recognizing that we don't have a choice. Health care has become too complex, and the current model isn't working very well," says Kevin Fiscella, MD, a professor of family medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center who co-authored a special issue article with McDaniel on the science of primary-care teams. "It's not a question of whether we adopt teamwork [in primary care], but how we do it—and how we begin addressing the barriers to teams."

Unfortunately, those barriers are not insignificant, Fiscella adds. One challenge is simply changing the way that many physicians think about primary care. "I graduated from medical school in 1980, and our whole training was that care is about me and the patient, and everybody else is there to support that relationship," he says. While that mentality is changing, it's not dead yet. "That unfortunate mental model of what it means to provide primary care can make it difficult" to move toward team thinking, he adds.

Systemic challenges also make collaboration difficult in primary-care settings. Clinicians such as family physicians, specialists and mental health professionals might be spread out in different locations. "It makes it harder to support other team members who are making important contributions," Fiscella says.

The traditional fee-for-service payment model also makes it difficult for medical professionals to prioritize teamwork, Fiscella and McDaniel add. Research has shown, for example, that when primary-care teams have short "huddles" before a visit to coordinate their care plans, they routinely report better teamwork and more supportive practice climates. Similarly, short team debriefings at the end of the day to hash out what worked and what didn't can boost learning and performance among team members and improve outcomes for patients.

Yet due to scheduling challenges, it can be tough for primary-care teams to find even a few minutes to come together for huddles or debriefings. "Time is money. If you take time out for a team meeting, that's lost revenue," Fiscella says.

Teamwork in the lab

Academia is famous for its departmental silos, but that, too, is changing as multidisciplinary research becomes the norm across all fields of science. Team science is gaining momentum for good reason, says Kara Hall, PhD, director of the Science of Team Science Team at the National Cancer Institute and co-author of a special issue article about collaboration in science.

Globalization and technology have made the pressing problems of society ever more complex, Hall says. Take the public health problem of reducing tobacco use, for instance. To address that challenge, you need an understanding of the genetic, neural, psychological and behavioral factors related to tobacco dependence, not to mention related social forces and the public policy context. "If you want to solve an applied global health problem, you need people who can bring their specialized knowledge to bear," she says. "Multidisciplinary teams can really [create] movement on these big problems."

Research on team science has found that collaborating across organizational and geographic boundaries increases productivity and scientific impact. And cross-disciplinary teams produce more academic publications and publish in more diverse outlets, Hall and her colleagues report.

Despite proven benefits, it can be hard for a researcher to wrap his or her head around team science. Most scientists were trained in an apprenticeship model, learning the ropes from a single mentor. "Historically, our scientists haven't been trained to work in teams or to lead teams," Hall says.

Even if scientists are prepared to take the leap to team-based research, their institutions might not be. Tenure and promotion are usually based on outputs such as academic publications, with more weight given to a paper's lead author and to articles published in journals in a researcher's own discipline. That model rewards competition, with the potential for tension as team members hash out who should be credited as first author. Team science is built instead on interdisciplinary cooperation—but so far, only a few academic institutions reward those cooperative efforts.

Because of the lack of team training and the institutional hurdles, Hall says, a research project may be technically and scientifically well-conceived yet fail to yield anticipated outcomes. If a cross-disciplinary team fails to meet its goals, was it because the topic was better suited to intradisciplinary science? Was it a problem with the way the team was composed? Or could the team have succeeded if members had received more institutional support and training?

Still, some early patterns are emerging to guide the way toward improved science teams, Hall and her co-authors report. Some studies have found that small teams are best for generating ideas that shake up the status quo, for instance, while larger teams are better at further developing those big ideas. And while cultural diversity can increase a science team's impact, diverse teams might benefit from more team science principles to head off challenges such as miscommunication.

Multicutural questions

The role of diversity in teamwork is a topic that needs a lot more attention, not just for scientific teams but in all areas of teamwork, says Jennifer Feitosa, PhD, an assistant professor of I/O psychology at the City University of New York, Brooklyn College. In the special issue, Feitosa and her co-authors describe the ways in which multicultural teams may function differently from teams in which all members share the same cultural background.

Yet it can take longer for a diverse team to find its groove than a team with similar backgrounds and mindsets. Individuals in multicultural teams are more likely to have different ways of doing things and might not understand where their fellow team members are coming from. "If you take a snapshot of a multicultural team at the beginning, it doesn't look so promising. They often need more time to all get on the same page," Feitosa says.

In both multicultural teams and more homogenous teams, trust is a key component for effective collaboration, Feitosa and her colleagues reported. But because of their differences, members of multicultural teams might have difficulty trusting each other at first.

"Focusing on shared goals can really help to develop that trust," she says.

In other ways, diverse teams operate quite differently from teams with cultural similarities. In the general teamwork literature, for example, research suggests that it's important to address and manage team conflict head-on. But when team members come from cultures that emphasize harmony and avoid conflict, calling out the elephant in the room can make people extremely uncomfortable and interfere with the teamwork dynamic, Feitosa says.

Differences in leadership style can also hinder multicultural teams. In North America, organizations are moving toward giving individuals greater autonomy and opportunities for self-management, Feitosa notes. "In very collectivistic and high power-distance cultures, people might rely more heavily on direction from team leaders and might rather be told what to do."

Fortunately, teams can prevent cultural differences from becoming obstacles by creating a "hybrid" culture, the authors report. "It's about establishing team norms that aren't entirely your culture or entirely my culture, but a little bit of everyone's," Feitosa says.

The research on multicultural teams can guide those looking to create collaborations that are both diverse and high-functioning. But to fully harness the value of cross-cultural perspectives and talents, Feitosa and her colleagues conclude, much more needs to be done to integrate findings from research on single-culture teams and multicultural teams. "Teamwork is a complex phenomenon, so we need to get more creative in how we look at this," she says.

Intervening to improve teamwork

Although researchers have more work to do to fully understand team processes, especially in multicultural contexts, it's not too early to apply what we know, Salas says. For the special issue, Salas and colleagues described evidence-based approaches for improving teamwork.

Organizations are clamoring for tools to make their teams more effective. "Team building is probably the No. 1 human resources intervention in the world," Salas says. Yet the results of such programs are mixed. If you send a group of executives into the wilderness for two days, they might have fun and learn something about one another—but it doesn't mean they'll magically develop new teamwork skills.

Put them into evidence-based team trainings, however, and the story is different. "Team training works," Salas says. "We know how to design, develop and evaluate it."

In particular, Salas and his colleagues describe four types of team development interventions that have been shown to benefit team performance: team training, team building, leadership training and debriefing.

Team training describes formalized learning experiences that aim to improve specific team skills or competencies. Structured team training has been shown to improve teamwork functioning and outcomes in industries such as education, engineering and health care. A prime example is TeamSTEPPS , an intervention to reduce medical errors by improving communication and teamwork skills among health-care professionals (see sidebar). Team-building interventions, meanwhile, aim to better teams by improving interpersonal relationships, clarifying roles and improving problem-solving. Such interventions might focus on increasing trust or setting challenging yet specific goals, for example. Leadership training targets a team leader's knowledge, skills and abilities, and improvements to these areas have been shown to support effective overall team processes. When leaders are trained in occupational safety, for instance, their teams exhibit safer behaviors on the job. Finally, team debriefings of the sort used in primary-care settings have been shown to improve performance in a variety of settings, including aviation and military teams.

There's power in numbers, and high-performing teams can be more than the sum of their parts. It's fortunate, then, that teamwork processes can be measured and improved with targeted interventions. But to keep sharpening the science, psychologists must continue exploring the conditions that allow teams to succeed, Salas says.

There's certainly no shortage of demand, he adds. "There's a tremendous amount of interest in trying to understand collaboration and teamwork—in health care, aviation, academia, the military, space exploration, the corporate world. I hope this special issue will inspire people to improve their teams, and to look for new ways of motivating their teams using psychological science."

To read the full American Psychologist special issue on teamwork, go to http://psycnet.apa.org/PsycARTICLES/journal/amp/73/4 .

Further resources

APA: A Curriculum for an Interprofessional Seminar on Integrated Primary Care www.apa.org/education/grad/curriculum-seminar

National Cancer Institute: Team Science Toolkit www.teamsciencetoolkit.cancer.gov

Related Articles

• Team building in health care

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Unraveling the effects of cultural diversity in teams: A retrospective of research on multicultural work groups and an agenda for future research

Günter k stahl.

1 Institute for International Business, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria

Martha L Maznevski

2 Ivey Business School, Western University, 1255 Western Road, London, ON N6G 0N1 Canada

Our 2010 Journal of International Business Studies article, “Unraveling the Effects of Cultural Diversity in Teams: A Meta-analysis of Research on Multicultural Work Groups,” attempted to take stock of existing research on cultural diversity in teams, to reconcile conflicting perspectives and past results, and provide a better understanding of the mechanisms and boundary conditions under which diversity affects team outcomes. To guide our analysis, we developed a theoretical framework outlining how cultural diversity leads to both process gains and losses in teams, and specifying the contextual conditions under which diversity contributes to effective team outcomes. We tested our hypotheses in a meta-analysis of research on cultural diversity in teams, encompassing 108 primary studies with a combined sample size of 10,632 work groups. The results suggested that cultural diversity does not have a direct impact on team performance but rather that the effect is indirect, mediated by process variables such as creativity, cohesion, and conflict; and is moderated by contextual influences such as team tenure, the complexity of the task, and whether the team is co-located or geographically dispersed. Unexpected findings raised important questions about the dynamics of diverse teams and underscored the need for further examination. In this Retrospective, we reflect on progress made in research on culturally diverse teams over the last decade, highlight remaining gaps and open questions, and propose an agenda for future research.

Notre article publié en 2010 dans Journal of International Business Studies , “Unraveling the Effects of Cultural Diversity in Teams : A Meta-analysis of Research on Multicultural Work Groups”, a tenté de faire le point sur les recherches existantes sur la diversité culturelle dans les équipes, de concilier les perspectives contradictoires et les résultats passés, et de fournir une meilleure compréhension des mécanismes et des conditions limites dans lesquelles la diversité affecte les résultats des équipes. Pour guider notre analyse, nous avons élaboré un cadre théorique décrivant comment la diversité culturelle entraîne à la fois des gains et des pertes de processus dans les équipes, et précisant les conditions contextuelles dans lesquelles la diversité contribue à l’efficacité des résultats des équipes. Nous avons testé nos hypothèses dans une méta-analyse de recherches sur la diversité culturelle dans les équipes, comprenant 108 études primaires avec un échantillon combiné de 10 632 groupes de travail. Les résultats suggèrent que la diversité culturelle n’a pas d’impact direct sur la performance des équipes mais que l’effet est plutôt indirect, médiatisé par des variables de processus telles que la créativité, la cohésion et le conflit; et qu’il est modéré par des influences contextuelles telles que la durée de vie de l’équipe, la complexité de la tâche et le fait que l’équipe soit co-localisée ou géographiquement dispersée. Des résultats inattendus ont soulevé d’importantes questions sur la dynamique de diverses équipes et ont souligné la nécessité d’un examen plus approfondi. Dans cette rétrospective, nous réfléchissons aux progrès réalisés sur la recherche concernant les équipes culturellement diversifiées au cours de la dernière décennie, nous mettons en évidence les lacunes et les questions ouvertes qui subsistent et nous proposons un programme de recherche pour l’avenir.

Nuestro artículo del 2010 del Journal of International Business Studies, “Unraveling the Effects of Cultural Diversity in Teams: A Meta-analysis of Research on Multicultural Work Groups,” intentó hacer un inventario de la investigación existente sobre diversidad cultural en equipo, para resolver perspectivas conflictivas y resultados anteriores, y proporcionamos un mejor entendimiento de los mecanismos y las condiciones limites bajo las cuales la diversidad afecta los resultados del equipo. Para guiar nuestro análisis desarrollamos un marco teórico esbozando cómo la diversidad cultural lleva tanto a ganancias de procesos como a pérdidas en los equipos, y especifica las condiciones contextuales bajo las cuales la diversidad contribuye a resultados efectivos. Probamos nuestras hipótesis en un meta-análisis de la investigación en diversidad cultural en equipos, englobando 108 estudios primarios con un tamaño de muestra combinado de 10.632 grupos de trabajo. Los resultados indicaron que la diversidad cultural no tiene un impacto directo en el desempeño del equipo, en su lugar el efecto es indirecto, mediado por variables como la creatividad, la cohesión, y el conflicto; y se modera por las influencias contextuales como la permanencia del equipo, la complejidad de la tarea, y si el equipo esta localizado en el mismo sitio o geográficamente disperso. Los hallazgos inesperados suscitan preguntas importantes sobre las dinámicas de los equipos diversos y destacaron la necesidad de un examen más profundo. En esta Retrospectiva, reflexionamos del progreso de la investigación sobre equipos culturalmente diversos en la última década, resaltamos las brechas restantes y las preguntas abiertas, y proponemos una agenda para futuras investigaciones.

Nosso artigo do Journal of International Business Studies de 2010, “Desvendando os efeitos da diversidade cultural em equipes: uma meta-análise da pesquisa em grupos de trabalho multiculturais” (“Unraveling the Effects of Cultural Diversity in Teams: A Meta-analysis of Research on Multicultural Work Groups,”), tentou fazer um balanço da pesquisa existente sobre diversidade cultural em equipes, para reconciliar perspectivas conflitantes e resultados passados e fornecer uma melhor compreensão dos mecanismos e condições de contorno sob as quais a diversidade afeta resultados de equipes. Para orientar nossa análise, desenvolvemos um modelo teórico que descreve como a diversidade cultural leva tanto a ganhos quanto perdas de processo em equipes e especifica as condições contextuais sob as quais a diversidade contribui para resultados eficazes de equipes. Testamos nossas hipóteses em uma meta-análise de pesquisas sobre diversidade cultural em equipes, abrangendo 108 estudos primários com um tamanho de amostra combinado de 10.632 grupos de trabalho. Os resultados sugeriram que a diversidade cultural não tem um impacto direto no desempenho da equipe, mas sim que o efeito é indireto, mediado por variáveis ​​de processo como criatividade, coesão e conflito; e é moderada por influências contextuais, como a longevidade da equipe, a complexidade da tarefa e se a equipe está co-localizada ou geograficamente dispersa. Descobertas inesperadas levantaram questões importantes sobre a dinâmica de equipes com diversidade e ressaltaram a necessidade de pesquisas adicionais. Nesta Retrospectiva, refletimos sobre o progresso feito na pesquisa sobre equipes culturalmente diversificadas ao longo da última década, destacamos lacunas remanescentes e questões em aberto, e propomos uma agenda para pesquisas futuras.

抽象

我们2010年的《国际商务研究杂志》文章“揭示团队里文化多样性的影响: 多元文化工作组研究的荟萃分析”, 试图总结已有的团队文化多样性研究, 以调和相互矛盾的观点和过去的结果, 并更好地理解多样性影响团队成果的机制和边界条件。为了指导我们的分析, 我们建立了一个理论框架, 概述了文化多样性如何导致团队过程的得失, 并确定了多样性对有效团队成果有帮助的情境条件。我们在团队文化多样性研究的荟萃分析中检验了我们的假设, 其中包括108项主要研究, 合并的样本总数达10,632个工作组。结果表明, 文化多样性不会对团队绩效产生直接影响, 而这种影响是间接的, 由创造力, 凝聚力和冲突等过程变量来调节; 并受诸如团队任期、任务复杂性、以及团队是在同一地点或是在地理分散的位置这样的情境影响所调节。出乎意料的发现对多样化团队的动态性提出了重要问题, 并强调了进一步研究的必要性。在本回顾中, 我们思考了过去十年来在多元文化团队研究方面取得的进展, 强调了仍然存在的差距和未解决的问题, 并提出了未来研究的议程。

INTRODUCTION

In our original article, “Unraveling the effects of cultural diversity in teams: a meta-analysis of research on multicultural work groups,” (Stahl, Maznevski, Voigt, & Jonsen, 2010 ), we argued that our study added to the existing literature on diverse teams in two important ways. First, we attempted to take stock of and synthesize the findings from previous research on cultural diversity in teams, to reconcile conflicting perspectives and past results, and to propose an agenda for the next stage of research in this field. Second, and more ambitiously, another goal was to improve our understanding of the mechanisms and boundary conditions under which cultural diversity affects team outcomes both theoretically and empirically. Thus, the aim of our paper was not just to summarize what had been found in previous research on diverse teams and provide a descriptive account of empirical regularities (and irregularities) but to go a step beyond existing reviews of the literature and develop a theoretical understanding of mediating mechanisms and contextual contingencies and then test those ideas using meta-analytic techniques.

Our point of departure in the JIBS Decade Award-winning article was an idea that we had developed over more than a decade of dialogue, based on research and review of the literature on multicultural teams, as well as our experiences as management educators, consultants, and coaches working with diverse teams – namely, the now widely accepted notion that cultural diversity presents a ‘double-edged sword’ or mixed blessing for work groups. Diversity can be a source of friction and conflict – and, hence, an obstacle to effective team functioning. But it can also be a source of synergy and learning – a powerful seed for something new, depending on factors that were poorly understood and under-explored in team diversity research at the time we embarked on this study. As we set out to explore some of the yet-unidentified factors that may moderate the relationship between diversity and team performance, we realized how little was actually known about the mechanisms and contingencies underlying the effects of cultural diversity in teams. Of course, there was a rich literature on diversity in work teams (for early meta-analyses of this work, see Bowers, Pharmer, & Salas, 2000 ; Horwitz & Horwitz, 2007 ; Stewart, 2006 ; Webber & Donahue, 2001 ), including plenty of studies that had looked at the link between cultural diversity and team outcomes (for our meta-analysis, we identified 108 studies that focused on cultural diversity and its consequences for team outcomes), but the evidence was inconsistent and confusing. While some studies found significant positive correlations between diversity and team performance (e.g., Earley & Mosakowski, 2000 ; Thomas, Ravlin, & Wallace, 1996 ), others produced significant negative correlations (e.g., Jehn & Mannix, 2001 ; Kirkman, Tesluk, & Rosen, 2004 ). There were no meta-analyses available that focused specifically on cultural diversity and its effect on team performance, but existing meta-analyses of research on work group member diversity/heterogeneity had found no overall relationship with team performance (Bowers et al., 2000 ; Webber & Donahue, 2001 ), had found a small positive effect (Horwitz & Horwitz, 2007 ), or had found a small negative effect (Stewart, 2006 ) across studies. This inconsistent pattern of results led diversity scholars to conclude that “research evidence demonstrating a business case for work team diversity is by and large equivocal” (Joshi & Roh, 2007 : 2), and that “much is still unknown regarding the nature of diversity, its impact on work group outcomes, and the intervening mechanisms” (Webber & Donahue, 2001 : 142).

There was, however, the consensus among scholars that clarifying the mixed effects of diversity in teams would only be possible by carefully considering contextual moderators and mediating mechanisms in both theory and empirical research on diverse teams (Joshi & Roh, 2007 ; Mannix & Neale, 2005 ). As we set out to disentangle what researchers had learned from decades of research on work group diversity and reconcile conflicting perspectives and findings in this field, we developed some theoretical ideas about the mechanisms and boundary conditions under which diversity may contribute positively or negatively to team outcomes.

In this Retrospective, we begin by revisiting the original paper, highlighting the most important elements and findings, to set the foundation for the rest of the paper. Next, we comment on progress in the field in the past decade, identifying several areas of advancement. In the remainder of the paper, we reflect on three areas in need of further research: specifying the type of (cultural) diversity more carefully, opening up the black box in the relationship between cultural diversity and performance in International Business (IB) research in general, and addressing both the positive and negative aspects of cultural diversity in a more nuanced way.

A RETROSPECTIVE PERSPECTIVE ON TEAM DIVERSITY RESEARCH

Theoretical framework: diversity drives process gains and process losses through forces of divergence and barriers to convergence.

In our 2010 paper, we focused on one particular type of diversity: cultural differences. Most team diversity research assumed that all diversity sources (gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.) affect work groups in the same way, and there are clearly some similarities among different types of diversity (e.g., van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007 ). However, there was already evidence that different diversity sources influence team outcomes in different ways (Horwitz & Horwitz, 2007 ; Joshi & Roh, 2009 ). Cultural diversity, in particular, may affect team processes and outcomes differently than other types of diversity (Lane, Maznevski, Mendenhall, & McNett, 2004 ; Lane & Maznevski, 2019 ; Taras et al., 2019 ). Cultural differences often operate at a subconscious level; therefore some of their effects may not be recognized or may be misattributed. At the same time, differences in culture are often a source of categorization and stereotyping (Mannix & Neale, 2005 ; Mortensen & Hinds, 2001 ), so the effects of cultural diversity may be stronger than other diversity sources.

A central tenet of our theoretical framework, as illustrated in Fig.  1 , was that cultural diversity drives process gains and process losses through forces of divergence and barriers to convergence. In line with theories of social identity, social categorization, similarity attraction, and information processing, we proposed that cultural diversity increases divergent processes in teams, leading to both process gains and process losses. A divergent process that creates a process gain and may contribute positively to team performance is creativity. A divergent process that creates a process loss and could decrease team performance is conflict. Conversely, our theoretical framework suggested that cultural diversity decreases convergent processes in teams. Convergent processes are those which provide integration and cohesion, and align the team around common goals and values. Like divergent processes, some convergent processes (e.g., the emergence of group identity and mutual trust) lead to process gains and contribute positively to team performance. Some convergent processes (e.g., conformity and compliance) can hinder effective team performance, for example, by making the team closed to dissent and vulnerable to groupthink. Thus, the underlying premise of this framework was that cultural diversity does not have a direct impact on team performance but rather that the effect is indirect, mediated by process variables such as creativity, cohesion, and conflict.

Theoretical framework guiding the meta-analysis.

Adapted from Stahl, Maznevski, Voigt, & Jonsen ( 2010 ).

Further, we proposed that diversity affects these mediating processes or intermediate outcomes in opposing ways, i.e., cultural differences may have a positive effect on some outcomes (e.g., creativity) and an adverse effect on others (e.g., cohesion). Finally, our theoretical analysis suggested that the extent to which the process gains from diversity can be maximized, and the process losses minimized will depend on three broad sets of factors, two of which we were able to test in our meta-analysis. First, we proposed that whether team members differ in overt demographic characteristics, such as nationality, ethnicity or race (i.e., surface-level diversity), or in deep-seated psychological characteristics such as cognitions and values (i.e., deep-level diversity) would affect team outcomes in different ways; and that the hypothesized positive and negative effects of cultural diversity would depend on whether a team is composed of members from several different countries (cross-national diversity) or members from a single country (intra-national diversity). Second, we predicted that aspects of the team context, such as team tenure, the complexity of the task, and whether the team is co-located or geographically dispersed would moderate the effects of cultural diversity on outcomes. Third, our analysis suggested that the way the team process is managed (including the staffing of the team, the communication process, group decision-making, and so on) would influence team outcomes like creativity, social integration, and conflict. Since there was a paucity of research on these more process-oriented and management-related factors, we could not include them in the meta-analysis. These considerations did, however, inform our theory development.

From this framework, we developed a set of hypotheses on how intermediate team outcomes relate to cultural diversity, as well as moderator hypotheses to theorize and study how the level and type of cultural diversity and aspects of the team context might affect team outcomes. We did not formulate a specific hypothesis linking cultural diversity to overall team performance. The very idea of our theoretical framework was that process gains and process losses resulting from diversity might offset one another in their impact on team performance, and would further depend on contextual moderators. The overall impact on team performance would be difficult, if not impossible, to predict.

Meta-Analytic Results: Cultural Diversity Indeed Appears to be a ‘Double-Edged Sword’

We tested our hypotheses using a meta-analysis of existing research on cultural diversity in teams, encompassing 108 primary studies with a combined sample size of 10,632 teams. Consistent with the theoretical logic explained above, the meta-analytic results revealed that overall team performance was unrelated to diversity, with a mean effect size close to zero. Further analyses showed a number of significant effects on intermediate team outcomes. As expected, the results suggested that teams gain from increased diversity in terms of greater creativity, but diverse teams tend to suffer from process losses due to increased conflict and reduced cohesion or social integration. Diversity was positively associated with three types of conflict (task conflict, relationship conflict, process conflict) relevant to the effective functioning of a team, but only the relationship with task conflict was significant.

Contrary to our predictions, the meta-analytic results indicated that cultural diversity was unrelated to communication effectiveness and positively associated with team member satisfaction. The hypothesis that culturally diverse teams are less prone to groupthink could not be tested due to the small number of studies that examined this question empirically. Collectively, these findings supported the conclusion that cultural diversity is associated with divergent processes. More diverse teams experience the process gain of increased creativity, but also the process loss of increased task conflict. Cultural diversity’s association with convergence was less clear. More diverse teams suffered the process loss of lower social integration and cohesion, but contrary to expectations, culturally diverse teams did not experience less effective communication, and they had higher satisfaction than homogeneous teams.

Counter to our hypotheses, but not entirely unexpected to us, we found that both the level (surface vs. deep) and type (cross-national vs. intra-national) of cultural diversity were largely unrelated to the team outcomes assessed in our meta-analysis. These “null findings” had the potential to stimulate and guide further exploration in the field of cross-cultural management in general and work on culturally diverse teams in particular. Tung and her colleagues (Tung, 1993 , 2008 , 2016 ; Tung & Stahl, 2018 ; Tung & Verbeke, 2010 ) have challenged the traditional view that the effects of cross-national diversity are stronger than for intra-national diversity, arguing that “intra-national variations can often be as significant as cross-national differences” (Tung, 2008 : 41). The findings of our meta-analysis supported this view by demonstrating that neither the positive effects of cultural diversity (on creativity and satisfaction) nor the adverse effects (on social integration and conflict) were more pronounced in teams composed of members from several different countries than in teams composed of members from a single country. With regard to the level of diversity, our theoretical analysis had suggested that surface-level attributes such as race or ethnicity would be associated with similarity-attraction and social-identity effects, and deep-level indicators such as cognitions and values would be related to information-processing advantages and value-incongruence effects. Contrary to our hypotheses, the findings showed that creativity, conflict, satisfaction, and social integration were all unrelated to the level (deep vs. surface) of cultural diversity.

These results highlighted the importance of specifying both the type and level of cultural diversity more carefully in research on diverse teams. Rather than assuming that cross-national and intra-national diversity, and surface-level and deep-level diversity, affect team processes and outcomes in similar ways just because the patterns of correlations are similar, we needed a more fine-grained understanding of how different diversity sources (e.g., ethnicity, language, values, cognitions) may affect the dynamics of culturally diverse teams in different ways. For example, deep-level cognitive differences such as holistic versus analytic cognitive style (e.g., Nisbett, 2003 ) may lead to information-processing advantages and improved group decision-making in a Sino-American work group, while deep-level value differences may simultaneously lead to social categorization processes, reduced cohesion, and increased potential for conflict in the team. We concluded that the simple categorization of surface-level and deep-level, which was ubiquitous in the diversity literature, may thus be misleading.

The use of meta-analysis to detect moderating effects not testable in the primary studies generally led to the study’s most interesting results – and substantially larger effect sizes than those obtained in the main effect analysis. The results of sub-group analyses revealed that the effects of cultural diversity on team outcomes are moderated by various aspects of the team context, but not always in the expected direction. For example, contrary to expectations, we found that cultural diversity was associated with higher levels of conflict and less effective communication in teams that had spent more time together compared to teams with less tenure. Another unanticipated, and potentially consequential, finding was that geographically dispersed teams had less conflict and more social integration than co-located teams. This finding suggests that we needed to understand much more about how diverse teams function when they are geographically dispersed. As we argued in our 2010 paper, the lower level of conflict in dispersed teams may represent an avoidance of engaging differences in values and opinion openly, or team members may simply have fewer chances to experience conflict related to value incongruence. Another explanation is that expectations play a critical role in shaping team outcomes such as conflict and social integration. Members of dispersed multicultural teams may be more attentive to cultural differences, more inclined to resolve conflicts constructively, and less prone to behavior that is detrimental to the effective functioning of a team, such as cultural stereotyping, the formation of sub-groups based on nationality, or social exclusion of team members who do not conform with the dominant values of the team.

In sum, although the meta-analytic results mostly supported the theoretical model, there were some unexpected findings that raised intriguing questions about the dynamics of culturally diverse teams and suggested promising directions for future research: Can surface-level indicators of cultural diversity, such as nationality, ethnic origin, or race, serve as a proxy for deep-level indicators such as cultural values? Does the potential for intercultural miscommunication and conflict increase, rather than decrease, in teams with longer tenure, maybe because process losses due to diversity’s effects accumulate over time, especially in teams experiencing significant pressure and strain? And could it be that a remote or virtual team context (as opposed to working in a co-located team) makes it easier, not more difficult, to avoid dysfunctional cultural clashes and create a climate of inclusion in a team? If so, what are the mechanisms that allow members of geographically dispersed teams to build trust and achieve high levels of social integration while minimizing cultural friction? And what role does communication technology play in this process? These questions are even more relevant today, in a post-Covid-19 environment and increasingly digitalized world, than they were 10 years ago when our article came out.

REFLECTING ON A DECADE OF PROGRESS

Significant progress has been made in multicultural teams research since we published our meta-analysis, of course, not only building on our research but also on other studies.

Our main recommendation was that future research should move beyond the question of whether cultural diversity has a positive or negative effect on team performance, and instead move on to fine-tune our understanding of processes as mediators and how these relationships are affected by moderators. Research now takes as a starting point that cultural diversity has both positive and negative effects, and particularly that diversity increases divergent processes and makes convergent processes more challenging. At the same time, the field of teams in management studies in general has also progressed, articulating more specific relationships between processes and emergent states (Waller, Okhuysen, & Saghafian, 2016 ). The impact of this precision can also be seen in international management studies. In this section, we review and comment on the progress in research on mediating processes, contextual and individual moderators, complex field studies that combine mediators and moderators, and the role of X-Culture in studying multicultural teams.

Intervening Processes that Mediate the Diversity–Performance Linkage: Creativity and Communication

Research has progressed significantly on two sets of important processes that link cultural diversity and team performance: the divergent process of creativity, and the convergent process of communication.

Culturally diverse teams are more creative

The largest effect size in our meta-analysis indicated that teams with high cultural diversity were more creative than teams with low cultural diversity. Because creativity is part of the process of innovating for new solutions (and often the two are even measured interchangeably in teams research), it is a very important intermediate team outcome. When we conducted our meta-analysis, we were disappointed not to be able to test any moderators for this relationship as we had only five studies that included creativity. Research on the relationship between diversity (including cultural diversity) and creativity in teams has almost exploded in the past 10 years (e.g., Crotty & Brett, 2012 ; Jang, 2017 ; Leung & Wang, 2015 ). The cultural studies were summarized well in a recent meta-analysis by Wang et al. ( 2019 ). Based on 44 studies conducted between 1985 and early 2018 (most of them after 2010), they reinforced that deep-level diversity is associated with more creativity due to its relationship with higher information diversity. This effect is moderated to be (more) positive when the team is collocated or is engaging in a task with high interdependence. Surface-level diversity, which can raise social identity threats, was negatively related to creativity and innovation for simple tasks and unrelated for complex tasks (other moderators were not significant). Further research will certainly explore more nuances around these relationships.

Language differences raise barriers to communication, overcoming them requires paying attention to other team dynamics

With respect to communication, there has been a long-overdue increase in research on the role of language differences in multicultural teams’ communication. We were not able to test the role of language differences at all in our meta-analysis, as there were not enough studies. The Journal of International Business Studies special issue on language (Brannen, Piekkari, & Tietze, 2014 ) set a landmark in this field. Two papers in that special issue focused on the relationship between language, communication, and other processes in multicultural teams. Tenzer, Pudelko, and Harzing ( 2014 ) looked at the relationship between language barriers and trust, showing that language differences and cultural differences are related in complex ways in their activation, perception, and impact. Hinds, Neeley, and Cramton ( 2014 ) showed the processes through which language differences and fluency levels influence power dynamics in teams, and the moderation of managing those dynamics through emotional regulation. These studies showed that language and culture are clearly related to each other, but the language and culture diversity activate and affect communication and other processes in multicultural teams. They have set a strong foundation for examining how communication barriers can be overcome.

Contextual Moderators: Geographic Configuration and Virtual Teams

Probably the most important, and certainly the most-studied, contextual moderator affecting multicultural teams is the extent to which they are geographically dispersed. Global Virtual Teams (GVTs) are internationally distributed teams working on joint tasks with international components or implications (Gibson & Gibbs, 2006 ; Maznevski & Chudoba, 2000 ), and they usually conduct most or all of their work together using communication technologies rather than face-to-face. As demonstrated by a large body of research on GVTs and virtual work, working together over technology increases the challenges faced by teams of any composition (Jimenez, Boehe, Taras, & Caprar, 2017 ; Reiche, Bird, Mendenhall, & Osland, 2017 ; Zander, Mockaitis, & Butler, 2012 ). In our meta-analysis, we were surprised with the finding that virtual teams had less conflict and more social integration than co-located teams. We suggested possible explanations, but the already-published research did not help us resolve the finding. Since then the research on GVTs has flourished. As noted by Zander and colleagues (2012), in GVTs it is not always easy to tease apart the extent to which dynamics are influenced by diverse composition, dispersed configuration (and virtual communication), or their combination. The effects on mediators of working virtually are similar to the effects of cultural diversity: both provide opportunities for divergence but raise barriers to convergence. The research patterns suggest that their effects usually multiply each other’s impact, especially in increasing barriers (Jimenez et al., 2017 ). Working virtually decreases the amount of non-verbal communication, and, therefore, decreases the amount of information available to develop judgements about trust, cohesion, and commitment (Reiche et al., 2017 ; Scott & Wildman, 2015 ). Working across time zones and across infrastructures increases the coordination costs of a project dramatically (Jonsen, Maznevski, & Davison, 2012 ). On the other hand, by being able to work across time zones, GVTs have the opportunity to work around the clock and access different networks and institutional resources (Wildman & Griffith, 2015 ).

In the past decade, more fine-grained research has been conducted on the relationship between cultural diversity and team mediators in dispersed teams. For example, Zakaria ( 2017 ) examined a large team’s e-mail communications through different stages of a decision-making process. She discovered that people from high-context cultures tended to use more indirect structures in their written communication, compared with people from low-context cultures. However, she also saw that people changed their communication style with different receivers and through different decision stages, suggesting that culture is not a simple determiner of virtual communication style. Klitmøller, Schneider, and Jonsen ( 2015 ) found that when team members from different cultures communicated using verbal media (e.g., telephone) rather than written media (e.g., e-mails), they were more likely to engage in social categorization leading to negative stereotypes and reduced trust.

Some recent research has begun to uncover the mechanisms through which working virtually can lead to positive dynamics and outcomes in GVTs. Nurmi and Hinds ( 2016 ), in a qualitative study, discovered that people engaged in global virtual work appreciated the opportunities to learn and innovate, and this in turn increased their satisfaction and engagement. The effect was enhanced when team members had the opportunity for off-job recovery, and did not need to be available all the time. Magnusson, Schuster, and Taras ( 2014 ) discovered that GVTs with a high average level of motivational cultural intelligence (CQ) put in extra effort to overcome perceived cultural differences, and increased their communication and conflict management effectiveness. Zakaria and Mohd Yusof ( 2020 ) examined the development of trust in GVTs over successive stages of a project. They saw that responsiveness was key to signaling reliability and adaptation, and therefore initiating cycles of increased trust-building. Responsiveness, though, was often affected by internet availability and time zone differences, and teams that were not mindful about these factors could ignore each other and spiral into cycles of decreased trust. Teams with members who were willing to engage in constructive conflict and revisit issues overcame the barriers to responsiveness and therefore trust-building. The common thread across these recent studies is the team members’ willingness to put in extra effort to overcome barriers, and future research will examine the antecedents of motivation further.

Individual-Level Factors: Individual Team Members Can Make a Big Difference

Recent research has addressed the effects of three important categories of individual-level moderators: individual knowledge and skills for working across cultures, individuals who are bi- or multi-cultural themselves, and team leader behaviors.

Cross-cultural competences and cultural intelligence

An extensive stream of research has examined cross-cultural competences and cultural intelligence (CQ) (Bird, Mendenhall, Stevens, & Oddou, 2010 ; Szkudlarek, Romani, Caprar, & Osland, 2020 ; Thomas et al., 2015 ), the set of knowledge, skills, and abilities required to interact effectively with people from different cultural backgrounds. This research has demonstrated clearly that increased cross-cultural competences lead to more effective communication, conflict management, trust building, and other processes and emergent states that mediate high team multicultural performance. Recent research has linked these competences more specifically to the team context, affirming their importance in teams. For example, followers’ increased cultural intelligence led to better individual task performance in global virtual teams, especially when contact intensity with the leader increased (Presbitero, 2020a ). Further, when perceived cultural distance is high, a leader is more likely to rate a team member’s performance as high if the leader also perceives that the team member has high cultural intelligence (Presbitero, 2020b ). Another study showed that team members are more likely to voice disagreement or new information if they or the leader has high cultural intelligence (Ng, Van Dyne, & Ang, 2019 ). Team dynamics over time are characterized by reciprocal causation, so it is also important that individuals develop cross-cultural competences through their experiences in multicultural teams (Caligiuri, 2015 ).

Individuals who are multicultural

Another important stream of research on the impact of individuals has evolved around multicultural individuals and how they affect organizational phenomena, as described recently in a comprehensive review by Vora et al. ( 2019 ). Research shows that multicultural individuals have a positive impact on several processes important in multicultural teams, including boundary-spanning communication (Yagi & Kleinberg, 2011 ) and social capital development (Fitzsimmons, Liao, & Thomas, 2017 ). In a recent study, Backmann and colleagues explored how cultural identity plurality is related to bridging processes in multinational teams (Backmann, Kanitz, Tian, Hoffmann, & Hoegl, 2020 ). They confirmed that individuals with more cultural identities engage in these bridging behaviors, with cultural intelligence as a mediator. We are sure to see more studies illustrating how multicultural individuals contribute to multicultural teams (Dau, 2016 ; Fitzsimmons, Miska, & Stahl, 2011 ). Different individuals have different ways of integrating (or not) their separate cultural identities, and the identities within an individual may be seen by others as more or less positive (Fitzsimmons, 2013 ). Because this aspect of individual-level multiculturalism is related to the intersectionality of diversities (see below), it is important that future research examine the effects of different types of multiculturalism.

Individuals as team leaders

Finally, the leader as an individual-level moderator has also been examined. The field of global leadership has progressed significantly (Mendenhall et al., 2018 ), and global teams are recognized as in important context both for practicing global leadership and for developing global leaders (Maznevski & Chui, 2018 ). Zander and colleagues (2012) applied the literature on team leadership to global teams and concluded that transformational leadership combined with cross-cultural competences provide appropriate leadership for helping multicultural teams to overcome barriers and realize opportunities. An increasing body of research focuses specifically on the role of the leader in multicultural teams. For example, Tröster and van Knippenberg ( 2012 ) found that leaders who were open to non-dominant ideas increased affective commitment, which in turn encouraged team members to voice local and contradictory ideas. Eisenberg and Mattarelli ( 2017 ) suggest that leaders who are effective cultural brokers help to bridge differences across subgroups, leading to more effective knowledge exchange. Lisak and Erez ( 2015 ) found that individuals high on all three of cultural intelligence, global identity, and openness to cultural diversity were more likely to emerge as leaders of multicultural teams. In another study, Lisak, Erez, Sui, and Lee ( 2016 ) demonstrated, in an R&D organization, that leaders with a strong global identity helped their multicultural teams focus on team-shared goals and innovate together. Studies like these, bringing together leadership, cross-cultural effectiveness, and team dynamics to explain effectiveness in multicultural teams, develop important knowledge for practitioners and we hope to see more of them.

Complex Combinations: Mediators, Moderators, and Multiple Levels of Analysis

We also note that we have a rise in more complex studies looking at combinations of mediators and moderators, including configurations of moderators at different levels of analysis simultaneously. One approach being applied more frequently in these studies is social network methodology. For example, Haas and Cummings ( 2015 ) applied social network methods within teams to examine knowledge exchange. They demonstrated that individual differences related to international configuration and different types of personal experiences affected the knowledge exchange process differently, with some flows moderated by people’s prior experience together. Vahtera et al. ( 2017 ) looked both within and across teams in an organization to uncover the antecedents of negative perceptions of social identity groups, to develop our understanding of how multicultural and globally dispersed teams link different parts of an organization together. In another study on networks of global virtual teams, Mattarelli et al. ( 2017 ) interviewed the brokers who explicitly connect the dispersed teams. They found that brokers who have a personal professional identity related to growth and learning tend to have more accurate perceptions about distant co-workers and enable teams to adapt their routines and do more challenging work.

Other studies have incorporated more analysis of the organizational environment into the multi-level complex research models. Hajro, Gibson, and Pudelko ( 2017 ) explored how a multinational organization’s climate with respect to the role of diversity affected knowledge exchange in multinational teams. They found that the more effective pattern of oscillating between assertive and cooperative knowledge exchange was more prevalent if the organization’s climate explicitly valued using cultural diversity to inform work. In the most comprehensive study examining multiple mediators and moderators over time, Gibson, Dunlop, and Cordery ( 2019 ) reported on a longitudinal field study of global teams in a multinational mining organization. They found that some formalization policies (but not others) had a positive effect on teams’ effectiveness, but only when implemented at some (but not other) points in the team’s journey. These effects were moderated by team members’ personal needs for structure.

These complex studies are challenging to undertake. They adapt multiple methodologies and often examine cause–effect relationships over time in order to parse the separate effects. We are pleased to see the field having evolved to the extent of being able to test relationships in these types of studies.

X-Culture as an Early Stage Research Lab

Finally, it is important to acknowledge the contribution of the X-Culture project to research on multicultural teams in the past decade. X-Culture is a multi-lateral initiative bringing together thousands of undergraduate and graduate students into global virtual teams each semester, to work on consulting projects for real clients (Taras, 2020 ). X-Culture was launched in 2010 with the dual goals of providing a relevant and valuable learning experience for students, and an opportunity for scholars to conduct research on virtual teams. In addition to delivering on its educational mandate, the initiative delivers for international management scholars the equivalent of social psychology’s student labs for studying dynamics in the early stages of research. The X-Culture research program is now bearing real fruit in providing tests of hypotheses before taking them to more complex field settings (e.g., Jang, 2017 ; Jimenez et al., 2017 ) and deconstructing the different effects of input and process variables more precisely (e.g., Taras et al., 2019 ). It is an important contribution and will allow us to turbo-charge more of our complex research designs.

In sum, the field of multicultural teams has made significant progress in the last decade, especially in the focus on different mediators and moderators in complex settings. The studies build on the theoretical foundations of information processing and social identity effects, and develop further richness around these perspectives by looking at how they explain performance in different empirical contexts. At the same time, the studies highlighted in this review represent “best practice” and not yet the norm for the field. In the next section, we turn to recommendations for future research, which include building on these best practices and extending them to other areas in International Business research.

LOOKING AHEAD TO THE NEXT DECADE

In this section, we focus on three areas of relevance to future research. First, we suggest there is interesting and important work to be done on the constructs of culture and cultural diversity in multicultural teams research. Second, we recommend a closer examination of the relationship between cultural diversity and performance across IB research, examining the relationships among multiple types, sources, and levels of (cultural) diversity more precisely. Finally, we advocate researching the positive effects of diversity while communicating the negative and mixed effects more carefully.

Culture and Cultural Diversity in Teams

One of the unexpected findings of our 2010 meta-analysis was that the level of cultural diversity (surface vs. deep) was unrelated to team outcomes such as creativity, conflict, satisfaction, and social integration, leading us to conclude that the simple categorization of surface-level and deep-level may be misleading and that future research on diverse teams needs to specify the level of cultural diversity more carefully. Although some studies still do not address or specify the level of cultural diversity, most are much more careful now. At the same time, though, they tend to define culture and diversity quite narrowly. Even while providing caveats that culture is not necessarily about nationality, most multicultural teams studies look only at national cultures, and within that most focus only on a few dimensions for differentiating cultures and defining multicultural team diversity. Zellmer-Bruhn and Maloney, in their recent review of cross-cultural teamwork, note that this narrow conceptualization of both culture and diversity has hindered the growth of the field, and they recommend expanding both of these constructs (Zellmer-Bruhn & Maloney, 2020 ).

Three recent studies have provided important perspectives for future research. The aforementioned meta-analysis by Wang et al. ( 2019 ) offers a fine-grained analysis of how surface-level and deep-level diversity attributes, in conjunction with team characteristics such as team virtuality, task complexity, and task interdependence, influence team creativity and innovation. In another study, Taras et al. ( 2019 ) abandoned the distinction between surface-level and deep-level indicators altogether and instead proposed a refined theoretical model that differentiates between the effects of personal versus contextual diversity and specifies how these distinct forms of diversity affect task outcomes and psychological outcomes in different ways. Their results revealed that contextual diversity (defined as differences in the characteristics of the environments that the team members come from, including economic development, human development, and national cultural orientations) has a positive effect on task outcomes; and personal diversity (defined as differences pertaining to the personal characteristics of the team members, including differences in age, gender, language skills, and personal values) has a negative effect on psychological outcomes. Tasheva and Hillman’s comprehensive conceptual framework (Tasheva & Hillman, 2019 ) suggests differentiating among three types of diversity (human capital, social capital, and demographic) at two levels of analysis (within-person and among people in a team). They argue that for tasks with different levels of required interdependence, these sources of diversity may be complementary or substitutes. These recent studies should lead the way for more research on how different diversity attributes, moderated by team characteristics and contextual conditions, affect processes and outcomes in diverse teams.

On a related note, the field must develop and adopt much more precise ways of measuring diversity. When we conducted our meta-analysis, diversity was usually measured by the proportion of the team in different categories. If there were two categories (e.g., domestic and international), the measure could simply be proportion of the minority category. If there were more than two categories, multi-proportionality was calculated to create a heterogeneity index (Blau, 1977 ). If the diversity variable was continuous, for example value diversity as measured by a self-assessment survey, diversity was measured by variance on those variables. Research today is still dominated by the same types of measures. Studies of psychic and perceptual distance, though, have popularized more sophisticated approaches to measuring perceptual distance between two people or two entities (Beugelsdijk, Kostova, Kunst, Spadafora, & van Essen, 2018 ; Zaheer, Schomaker, & Nachum, 2012 ), from comprehensive distance arrays to spatial dependence drawing from geography techniques (e.g., Plummer, 2010 ). We are beginning to see this perspective in multicultural teams, but so far it has mainly been applied to dyads within teams (e.g., Magnusson et al., 2014 ; Ng et al., 2019 ). Mathematically, diversity could be measured as distance among multiple group members. If we could measure the extent of diversity more precisely, we would be able to explore, for example, whether there are thresholds of diversity above which specific leadership interventions are essential.

In addition, it is abundantly clear that more research is needed on intersections of different types of diversity. Multicultural teams are rarely diverse only on culture. Especially for global work, they are usually diverse on gender, functional background, and possibly even organizational representation. One finding we found interesting in our meta-analysis was not in our 2010 publication. While there was no direct effect between cultural diversity and performance, teams that were high on both cultural diversity and gender diversity had significantly lower performance (effect size − 0.11, p  < .001), lower satisfaction (effect size 0.31, p  < .01), and lower cohesion (effect size − 0.13, p  < .01) (Stahl, Maznevski, Voigt, & Jonsen, 2006 ). Space prohibited our exploration of that result in the article, but we have reflected on it since.

It is possible that we were picking up the effect of faultlines or other patterns of intersectionality. Most research on diverse teams focuses on one “source” of diversity at a time, seeing other sources as moderators. We followed this pattern when we published the meta-analysis. Faultline research examines the alignment of two or more types of diversity in a team, such as gender and culture or nationality and function (Lau & Murnighan, 1998 , 2005 ). In general, research has found that faultlines tend to moderate relationships between diversity and outcomes, such that any negative impact of diversity is more negative when faultlines are “activated,” or perceived as salient by the team’s members (e.g., Antino, Rico, & Thatcher, 2019 ; Bezrukova, Spell, Caldwell, & Burger, 2016 ; Spoelma & Ellis, 2017 ). In other words, faultlines split groups into “us” and “them,” and it is difficult for groups to bridge these faultlines. Empirical research on faultlines has rarely examined culture (especially deep-level elements of culture, such as values) as one of the dimensions of diversity. There is a well-established stream of research on faultlines in top management teams (e.g., Orlando Curtae, Wu, Markoczy, & Chung, 2019 ), and another on faultlines based on information- and identity-based characteristics (Spoelma & Ellis, 2017 ). The findings from this research are highly relevant to multicultural teams. For example, Spoelma and Ellis found that external threats mitigated the negative effects of identity-based (gender) faultlines on team creativity.

Intersectionality acknowledges the fact that all individuals identify with and are influenced by multiple identities simultaneously, and all of these identities can be considered sources of diversity if they differ within a team. IB research focuses on cultural diversity because cultures influence shared experiences of, expectations for, and assessments of social interactions and decision-making, which in turn affect the conduct of business. Experiences of other social identities also greatly affect shared social interactions and decision-making. For example, gender, sexual orientation, race, neurological characteristics, and socio-economic status are all associated with both individual and commonly shared perspectives. Their combinations have complex effects, depending in part on whether they reinforce or complement each other with respect to the way they are perceived by others or are embedded within the society’s or an organization’s power systems.

In today’s environment, it is no longer enough to look at one source of diversity alone. In the future, we hope to see better articulation of dimensions of diversity, more precise measurement of diversity, and richer examination of configurations and intersectionalities of diversity.

Open the Black Box of the Diversity–Performance Link Beyond Multicultural Teams

As we noted at the outset of this Retrospective, research on the effects of cultural diversity in teams had yielded inconclusive, and sometimes conflicting, results. Thus, one of the aims of our study was to clarify the mixed effects of cultural diversity in teams and to reconcile conflicting perspectives and past results. It is important to note, though, that the pattern we observed was not confined to studies on culturally diverse work groups. Rather, it had been observed with respect to cultural diversity and cultural distance in a wide range of IB contexts and different subfields within IB research, including work on MNE performance, foreign market entry, FDI and expansion, international alliances and M&A, cross-border knowledge transfer and learning, and other research on culture in IB (Leung, Bhagat, Buchan, Erez, & Gibson, 2005 ; Tihanyi, Griffith, & Russell, 2005 ). For example, Tihanyi et al. ( 2005 : 270) summarized the results of their meta-analysis of research on cultural distance as follows: “[R]esults failed to provide statistical evidence of significant relationships between cultural distance and entry mode choice, international diversification, and MNE performance. The examination of moderator effects, however, yielded important results. …Substantial additional research is needed before the role of cultural distance is fully understood.” Similarly, Cartwright and Schoenberg ( 2006 : 3–4), in a review of research on the role of culture in cross-border M&A, concluded that “the relationship between culture and performance continues to intrigue and confuse researchers as studies examining this link in relation to international M&A have produced rather mixed, and often contradictory results. … Existing research remains incomplete in some way.” Taken together, the evidence indicated that across various domains of IB studies, effect sizes for the relationship between cultural differences (or related constructs such as cultural distance and cultural diversity) and performance outcomes were generally small and often not significantly different from zero. Effects seemed to be contingent on contextual factors, and results about the direction of effects were inconclusive and “confusing.”

In our meta-analysis of team diversity research, we found two complementary theoretical explanations for a zero-direct-effect relationship between cultural diversity and team performance and other “anomalies” identified in past research: simultaneous positive and negative effects on intermediate outcomes; and, moderated relationships with intermediate outcomes. We also found the effects of study design characteristics, which could have been related to different methods testing the same thing, or the different methodologies in fact identifying different relationships. In addition, there were alternative explanations we were unable to test in our meta-analysis, but that help explain the sometimes-puzzling results obtained in prior research. These explanations are summarized in Table  1 . Although these explanations have been explored in research on multicultural teams, they have not been as systematically applied in other areas of IB research, and we suggest that research would benefit from adopting these perspectives. We look more closely at each of the explanations in turn.

Table 1

Opening up the black box of the diversity–performance link: explanations for a zero-direct-effect relationship and other “anomalies” found in previous research

Positive and negative effects on mediating variables

Our theoretical framework applied the input-mediator-output approach to understanding group relations (Lepine, Piccolo, Jackson, Mathieu, & Saul, 2008 ; Mathieu, Maynard, Rapp, & Gilson, 2008 ). We proposed that cultural diversity drives process gains and process losses by increasing divergence and raising barriers to convergence (Earley & Gibson, 2002 ; Mannix & Neale, 2005 ). We anticipated that these two effects on mediating variables might partially or fully cancel each other out, and the results of our meta-analysis largely supported this pattern. Overall, team performance was unrelated to diversity, and diverse teams’ gains from greater creativity and higher team member satisfaction were about evenly matched with losses from increased task conflict and lower social integration. As described above, research on multicultural teams in the past decade has studied these mediating variables with much more depth.

This mediating pattern may also explain the conflicting or zero-direct-effect relationships between cultural differences and performance found in other domains of IB research, such as work on entry mode choice, MNE performance, cross-border knowledge transfer and learning, and international alliances and M&A (Beugelsdijk et al., 2018 ; Stahl, Tung, Kostova, & Zellmer-Bruhn, 2016 ; Tihanyi et al., 2005 ; Tung & Verbeke, 2010 ). For example, Tihanyi et al. ( 2005 : 278–279) concluded from the results of their meta-analysis that “cultural distance does not appear to be directly related to entry mode choice, international diversification, or MNE performance” and suggest that this “disturbing” pattern of results might be due to intervening processes, such as MNEs’ risk-minimization strategies and learning effects. As another example, and closely paralleling the results of our meta-analysis of team diversity research, the findings of a meta-analysis of research on cultural distance and cross-border M&A (Stahl & Voigt, 2008 ) revealed that post-merger performance was unrelated to cultural differences, with a mean effect size of zero. However, the effect sizes derived from the primary research studies ranged widely, from highly negative to highly positive. Further analyses revealed that cultural distance predicted outcomes such as sociocultural integration, synergy realization, and financial performance in opposing ways (e.g., the effect on synergy creation was positive, the effect on sociocultural integration was negative), canceling each other out in their impact on overall M&A performance.

Moderated relationships

Our meta-analysis clearly suggested that cultural differences mattered to the performance of diverse teams, but they indeed seemed to present a “double-edged sword” or mixed blessing – they could be positively or negatively associated with the same mediating outcome, depending on other factors. Sub-group analyses unearthed a number of contextual factors that moderated the relationships between cultural diversity and intermediate team outcomes. As reviewed above, recent research on multicultural teams has enhanced further understanding of these moderated relationships, with some studies examining them in complex combinations.

Again, there appear to be some striking similarities between the dynamics of cultural diversity within teams and the way cultural differences affect processes and outcomes in other organizational contexts, such as international R&D collaborations, joint ventures, and M&A. For example, Stahl and Voigt’s ( 2008 ) meta-analysis on M&A revealed the presence of contextual influences, such as the degree of firm relatedness and the integration approach taken by the acquirer, which moderated the relationships between cultural distance and various M&A outcomes. Tihanyi et al., in their meta-analysis on cultural distance effects in IB, also found that “[t]he examination of moderator effects…, yielded important results. The cultural distance–international diversification relationship was negative for high-technology industries, while it was positive for other industries.” (Tihanyi et al., 2005 : 270).

However, research on cultural distance and cultural diversity in other parts of IB has not yet illuminated the role of moderators in sophisticated ways. For example, Beugelsdijk et al. ( 2018 ), in probably the most comprehensive meta-analysis of research on cultural distance and firm internationalization to date, found opposing cultural distance effects depending on whether home and host countries are developed or emerging markets. Their results suggest that when the home country is an emerging market, the negative effect of cultural distance on performance turns positive; alternatively, when the host country is an emerging market, the negative effect of cultural distance on performance becomes even more negative. However, due to the small number of primary studies that tested these contingencies, they were unable to explore alternative explanations of the home and host country and developed and emerging market moderator effects. Importantly, Beugelsdijk and colleagues observed that there is a paucity of work examining the role of management-related factors. The few studies that addressed management aspects such as the benefits of the transfer of practices yielded large effect sizes of cultural distance. They concluded: “Understanding when and for which aspects of the internationalization process cultural differences really matter is a necessary step in learning how to manage and possibly leverage such differences” (Beugelsdijk et al., 2018 : 123).

Effects of study design and sample characteristics

This leads us to another important observation, namely how aspects of the research design might impact study results. Our meta-analysis revealed that the study setting (laboratory or field) and the location where the research was carried out (North America or elsewhere) influenced the research findings, and so did the study design (longitudinal or cross-sectional). Regarding the latter, few studies used a longitudinal design to look at intervening processes and how they unfold over time, or to test how team outcomes change over time. Whereas the large number of studies that utilized a cross-sectional design found that cultural diversity, on average, was negatively associated with team performance, the considerably smaller number of studies that utilized a longitudinal design yielded a positive mean effect size, suggesting that diverse teams outperform homogenous teams over time. Was this effect simply study characteristics, or was there more going on about longitudinal tasks providing more context for the benefits of diversity?

As another example, the results of our meta-analysis suggested that the geographic region where the research was carried out influenced the study results. While studies conducted outside of North America found that cultural diversity is positively associated with conflict, studies carried out in North America found no such relationship. Obviously, these results must be interpreted with some caution – for example, it cannot simply be concluded that the members of historically diverse societies such as Canada or the US, compared to countries like Germany or Japan, are better able to manage conflict associated with cultural diversity. It could also be that cross-country cultural diversity outside North America is greater than or works differently from cultural diversity within North America (mostly within either Canada or the United States, not cross-country). But these findings alert us to the fact that demographic attributes like race or ethnicity play a different role in different countries.

Thus, researchers need to pay more attention to how aspects of the study design, location, and sample characteristics may affect the cultural dynamics of the research being conducted. As we reviewed, there have been more complex field studies published about multicultural teams in the past decade. They provide precise theorizing and testing about elements of the study design and context (e.g., Cramton & Hinds, 2014 ; Gibson et al., 2019 ; Hajro et al., 2017 ; Hinds et al., 2014 ). Yet not all studies on multicultural teams follow this pattern, and we encourage more studies to do this.

Other areas in IB should follow suit. For example, Beugelsdijk et al. ( 2018 ), in their meta-analysis of the literature on cultural distance and firm internationalization, found that cultural distance effects are sensitive to the measurement and operationalization of cultural distance (e.g., perceptual measures or cultural distance index based on secondary data), as well as the sample structure (e.g., developed or emerging markets). Again, due to the small number of studies that addressed these contingencies, the authors were unable to fully explore the effects of study design characteristics, but the results of this meta-analysis highlight their importance and present opportunities for future research.

Non-linear effects of diversity on outcome variables

There is another possible reason for the inconsistent and sometimes confusing results obtained in past research that is methodological in nature. It seems likely that the effects of cultural differences are not always linear but may vary depending on the amount of cultural diversity present in a team or organization. Drawing on March’s ( 1991 ) exploration versus exploitation organizational learning framework, Stahl and Tung ( 2015 ) proposed that across various IB contexts and levels of analysis cultural diversity exhibits an inverse U-shaped relationship with the capacity for learning and other positive outcomes. That is, as diversity increases – across individuals in an organization, across different sub-units in an MNE, across different groups in a societal setting – the capacity for learning and the potential for synergy increases, but beyond a certain threshold level, the relationship turns downwards as the amount of diversity becomes overwhelming and hard to manage or cope with. In other words, there might be a “too-much-of-a-good-thing” effect (Grant & Schwartz, 2011 ) when it comes to cultural differences and cultural diversity. This is consistent with the general idea that many positive qualities have costs that at higher levels may begin to outweigh their benefits. The greater variety of ideas, perspectives and experiences that a diverse team brings to the table may thus be an asset and contribute to improved group decision-making as long as the group’s diversity is at a moderate level, but at very high levels (e.g., if team members come from very different cultures or if several diversity sources combine and their effects align or accumulate) they can be harmful and lead to miscommunication, lack of cohesion, and conflict (e.g., Earley & Mosakowski, 2000 ; Lau & Murnighan, 1998 ).

Becoming serious about opening the black box of culture’s impact

In general, research on culture in IB has suffered from overly simplistic assumptions about cause and effect relationships, specifically the assumption that cultural differences have a direct effect on performance, regardless of the process and context. Few studies have attempted to test more complex models that include various levels of culture, moderating variables, intervening processes, and multiple outcome measures. To advance research on culture in IB, we need to adopt more complex “input-process-output-context” models. Gibson, Maznevski, and Kirkman ( 2009 ) caution that such complex moderated mediation models necessitate changes in research design, particularly with regard to sampling and data analysis. For example, investigating the influence of multiple moderator variables and intervening mechanisms concurrently may require more complex field research, including the need to engage in longitudinal studies, especially when these moderators include process-oriented and management-related factors (Tung & Stahl, 2018 ).

More research on the Positive Effects of Diversity, and More Careful Communication of the Negative and Mixed Effects

It is now widely accepted among diversity and cross-cultural management scholars that cultural diversity has both positive and negative effects, and our 2010 meta-analysis indeed provided evidence supporting the “double-edged sword” nature of cultural diversity in teams. However, the field of team diversity research is still characterized by an over-emphasis on the negative, and researchers have expended little effort on developing new theoretical perspectives highlighting the positive dynamics of cultural diversity. In their review of the team diversity literature, Stahl, Mäkelä, Zander, and Maznevski ( 2010 ) concluded that all but one of the dominant theoretical perspectives on cultural diversity in teams are consistent with the problem-focused view of diversity. They emphasize the process losses resulting from reduced perceptions of similarity-attraction among team members; negative biases associated with social categorization processes; feelings of dislike and resentment due to incongruent values; and communication barriers resulting from differences in language and communication styles. The only “positive” exception is information-processing theory, which holds that diversity may lead to information processing advantages due to team members’ different perspectives, knowledge bases, and decision-making styles, which, if properly harnessed, can enhance creativity and decision-making quality. This positive exception has been studied extensively already in the relationship between cultural (and other types of) diversity and creativity (Wang et al., 2019 ), but other positive aspects of cultural diversity have not yet been researched.

Stahl and Tung ( 2015 ) have argued that current theory in IB, in general, tends to over-emphasize the “dark side” of culture by focusing primarily on the difficulties, costs, and risks associated with cultural differences and underlying drivers while paying scant attention to the potentially positive effects of cultural diversity and how they can be explained. Their content analysis of 1141 articles on culture in IB published in the Journal of International Business Studies over a 24-year time period revealed a 17:1 imbalance of negative over positive theoretical assumptions in studying the role of culture in various IB contexts, demonstrating that there is an overwhelming emphasis on the liabilities associated with cultural differences. Thus, there is a need to develop new theoretical models to examine the positive aspects of cross-cultural dynamics and account for the mixed effects of cultural differences observed in various sub-fields within the IB field, including work on culturally diverse teams.

At the same time, ironically, the management perspective on diversity tends to be overwhelmingly positive. McKinsey & Company reported again in 2020 that “The business case for inclusion and [gender, ethnic and cultural] diversity is stronger than ever. For diverse companies, the likelihood of outperforming industry peers on profitability has increased over time, while the penalties are getting steeper for lack of diversity” (Dixon-Fyle, Dolan, Hunt, & Prince, 2020 ). According to their research, companies in the top quartile of gender and ethnic diversity in the executive team are likely to perform better than the industry average on earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT), while companies in the bottom quartile of gender and ethnic diversity in the executive team are likely to perform worse than the industry average on EBIT. Boston Consulting Group (BCG) reported that companies with more diverse (on many dimensions, including culture and ethnicity) management teams had higher proportions of their revenue coming from innovation (Lorenzo, Voigt, Tsusaka, Krentz, & Abouzahr, 2018 ). The World Economic Forum declared that “The business case for diversity in the workplace is now overwhelming” (Eswaran, 2019 ). These studies tend to use large cross-sectional samples with public data to test correlations, although some (e.g., McKinsey) are now tracking firms over time and can examine within-firm trends. Further, these studies rarely examine mediators or moderators in any depth or with rigorous research designs. A Google search “Does diversity improve performance?” produces a plethora of results from the popular press and consulting firms “showing” that diversity increases company and board performance, and very few links questioning the notion (the few are inevitably academic studies).

We find it curious and unsettling that the well-established finding from academia, that diversity is a double-edged sword, tends not to be shared by or accepted in practice. In our own experience with leaders in organizations, the message “diversity is always good” does not fit with most people’s lived experience. Yet the message itself has the potential to shut down the very dialogue it needs to open up by denying any possibility that diversity can lead to lower performance, and dismissing the importance of contingencies (moderator variables). We suggest this is an area in which practitioner-scholar dialogue has not yet been sufficient, and we must take our share of responsibility for that. For example, our research on mediators and moderators in multicultural teams should be better integrated with research on multicultural competences development, as illustrated by the studies on cross-cultural competences and CQ in teams reviewed above. These approaches should be applied not just to international management situations but also more frequently (and with more legitimacy) to within-country situations and intersectionalities (Maznevski, 2020 ).

Conclusion: More Research Needed

With global tensions around immigration, refugees, prejudice, and pandemics at new heights, research on multicultural teams has never been more important. At the same time, the potential benefits from multicultural teams, such as innovation, improved decision-making, and engagement in distributed working relationships, have never been more needed. Multinational enterprises and the societies in which they operate need to know how diversity is related to performance, in which configurations and which contexts diversity matters most, and, importantly, how the potential benefits of diversity can be unleashed while the frictions arising from diversity can be mitigated. In the field of international business, in general, diversities of all kinds will likely widen in light of the rising economic power of emerging markets, the seismic changes that have occurred in the international political landscape, and the growing economic, social and environmental problems facing the world (George, Howard-Grenville, Joshi, & Tihanyi, 2016 ). These developments highlight the urgent need to understand diversity and its impacts in today’s world to avert mistakes and, possibly, cataclysmic consequences that cultural misunderstanding, discordance, and conflict may bring (Tung & Stahl, 2018 ).

By studying diverse teams and organizations with a broader sense of culture, more nuanced measurement of diversity, and more fine-grained examination of the relationships between multiple sources of diversity and combinations of moderators and mediators, we can improve our understanding of how cultural diversity can create value for global organizations and society, such as learning through cross-border knowledge-sharing and collaboration, leveraging the talent of migrants and refugees, and unleashing of creative potential in diverse teams. Addressing these research questions will also allow us to offer managers leading diverse teams and organizations much-needed guidance and the ability to build capacity in this important area.

We are pleased that the field has grown in richness in the past 10 years, enough that we can offer direction for today’s scholarship, multinational enterprises and societies. Yet we find ourselves impatient, reflecting that the progress is not nearly enough. As a field, we have not kept pace with the accelerating needs of our stakeholders. We do not have adequate answers or clear advice for the ever-more-complex situations that leaders of global organizations face. We hope that scholars in the field share our sense of urgency and that the reflections and suggestions in this Retrospective help propel this research forward.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of our original co-authors Andreas Voigt and Karsten Jonsen, and of our close friend and diversity professional Josefine van Zanten (IMD). We also express our appreciation to the JIBS Decade Award committee; to Alain Verbeke, Dana Minbaeva, and Piers Steel for their insights into the impact of the original paper; and to the anonymous reviewers of the Retrospective. Professor Stahl acknowledges support from the Center for Sustainability Transformation and Responsibility (StaR) at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Professor Maznevski acknowledges research funding from the Ivey Business School and from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Thank you to Ivey Research Assistants Rebecca Taylor and Komal Patel for their contributions to the literature reviews.

Biographies

is Professor of International Management and Co-director of the Centre for Sustainability Transformation and Responsibility (STaR) at theVienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna). His current research interests include the drivers of corporate responsibility and irresponsibility, grandsocietal challenges and their implications for international business and management, and the changing nature of global work.

(Ph.D., Ivey) is Professor and Co-Director of Executive Education at Ivey Business School, Western University, Canada. Her research focuses on multicultural teams, cross-cultural competences, global leadership, diversity and inclusion, and leading continuous and disruptive change in a complex environment. She teaches in degree programs at all levels and works globally with executives in companies and not-for-profit organizations.

Publisher's Note

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Accepted by Alain Verbeke, Editor-in-Chief, 26 October 2020. This article has been with the authors for one revision and was single-blind reviewed.

Contributor Information

Günter K Stahl, Email: [email protected] .

Martha L Maznevski, Email: ac.yevi@iksvenzamm .

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Impact of Effective Teamwork on Employee Performance

This research examined the impact of Teamwork on employee performance. The study adopted descriptive and explanatory research design. Further this study used a cross sectional survey methods using a survey questionnaires, containing 35 items with Likert Scale (Disagree-1 and 5 for Agree). A questionnaire was developed based on past literature and numerous tests were done to test the normality, reliability and validity of the data. The independent variables to measure effective teamwork are Effective communication, Team Cohesiveness, Accountability, Interpersonal skills, Leadership and Level of trust. The dependent variable used in this research is employee performance. The samples of 107 employees from an entertainment company in Kuala Lumpur capital of Malaysia were selected using simple random probability sampling technique. The collected data was analysed using descriptive means and regression via SPSS.20. This study found that all the chosen factors have significant relationship with teamwork. This research find Efficient Communication, Level of trust, Leadership and Accountability has a positive and significant impact on employee performance. While we found no significant influence of Intrapersonal skills and Cohesiveness on Employee Performance. Though this research included only one entertainment organisations, future studies may include larger sample by conducting the study on more organisations including manufacturing industry, Financial firms etc. to see the variation in the results. The future studies may compare differences based on socio-demographic profile and might examine the similarities and difference of motivational factors in different sectors in Malaysia.

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Effective communication is necessary across all management tiers and functions. In addition, it is an integral part of managerial decision-making. Over the last 10 years, interest in the nuances of communication as related to management has intensified. These studies have fostered diverse approaches to linking management and communication. Our investigation, using 2x5 and 2x4 factorial ANOVAs, reveals that differences exist among the means of five professional communication fields. Numerous articles published between 2004 and 2013 were examined, and we found an increasing usefulness for managerial communication research on the main topic of management.

Ismail Nizam

Motivation and its impact on performance has always remained highly researched area and have gone through many discussions and iterations and through this paper a deeper investigation is made to identify the impact of Motivation on performance of the employees. Independent variables used to gauge Motivation are Training and Development, Reward and Recognition and Delegation of Authority whereas the dependent variable is employee performance. Descriptive and explanatory design has been adopted for this study and the survey questionnaire comprised of 20 questions prepared based on Likert Scale (strongly disagree -1 and 5 for strongly agree). Sample size consisted of 100 employees from electronic manufacturing company in china and used simple random probability sampling technique. Collected details were analyzed via SPSS employing regression and correlation. The most interesting aspect is that result of this study found all the factors chosen have significant relationship with motivation.

Mila Hakanen , Mia Häkkinen

Team building is one of the key factors of success in business. This study highlights the key elements of building winning teams, where trust is one essential building block and top-level sports teams serve as instructive examples. This study highlights earlier findings that revealed a strong connection between trust and high-performing teams. High-performing teams need talented people but also constant trust-based cooperation. Trust supports cooperative behaviour. Studies of top-level sports teams also emphasize the role of trust when building high-performing teams. This study is implemented using conceptual research in order to organize information related to the complex phenomenon of high-performing teams. The conceptual approach was chosen instead of empirical research due the lack of prior holistic research into high-performing teams including perspectives on trust and sports teams. A theoretical framework is proposed by analysing key characteristics and defining high-performing teams and related concepts. The framework highlights dimensions such as clear vision, trust and communication. Team member skill, motivation and responsibilities were highlighted, and respect and support were also addressed. Leadership is a critical dimension that includes clear roles, standards and goals. The proposed framework for building high-performing teams offers the basis for subsequent empirical research.

Wan Afezah Rahman

Empathy and trust are among the key factors in building a stronger relationship between two parties or more. Today, more and more organizations are recognizing the importance of the relationship between empathy and trust in order to serve their employees better. Empathy and trust are pivotal in helping the organizations become better workplace environments. This is because the current business world is characterized by rapid globalization, which has led to an increase in the growth and prominence of multinational organizations. This trend towards globalization has increased the challenges faced by business organizations, which have to manage their employees across cultures, time zones, and organizational structures. Accordingly, the reality of a global market calls for business organizations to increase empathy skills and instill trust among employees in order to have strong organizational structure and to enhance business survival and continuity.

S. O. Badmus

The aims of this study are in two folds; first to examine if any EPL club could maintain efficiency over the period (2005 – 2015) and second, to identify the most efficient club(s) within the same period using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). There are limited studies on this type of investigation. Contrary to [2] the result shows that there is a high degree of inefficiency among EPL clubs and that only one club (Aston Villa) could maintain efficiency over the research period. The results further confirm that efficiency is not an absolute privilege of national league champions or big clubs, which motivated the study in the first place. However, inefficiency is largely due to waste of productive resources among EPL clubs. Keywords: Performance; Efficiency; input-oriented; output-oriented; Football.

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Rembrandt Klopper

Values: An Organizational Resource

Paola Ochoa Pacheco

The objective of this research was to describe the dimensions of psychosocial malaise and the work values in physicians at two Ecuadorian hospitals. The research design was cross sectional. A convenience sample was composed by 169 physicians who completed a questionnaire to evaluate their psychosocial malaise and their work values (Schwartz, 2001). The results showed medium levels of somatization, exhaustion and alienation. Moreover the groups who work in critical departments showed highest levels of somatization, exhaustion and alienation. The values more frequent in physicians with high levels of somatization, exhaustion and alienation are self-transcendence believes. It’s significant that physicians share a philosophy and work values which have built around values as self-transcendence because their Hippocratic profession and service vocation.

Theuns Pelser

The North West Development Corporation (NWDC) in the North West Province of South Africa has its head office situated in Mafikeng and is primarily there to foster the business development of Small, Medium and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs). The empirical focus of the study was in the Ngaka Modiri Molema region (Mafikeng and Zeerust) since it encapsulates the capital city of the Province and had the highest population of registered SMMEs. The research problem was the perceived lack of effective marketing communication from the NWDC regarding its support services and the lack of (researched) feedback from the registered SMMEs regarding their satisfaction with NWDC services rendered. The research objectives formulated to address the problem were to identify the marketing communication challenges of the NWDC, determine the effectiveness of NWDC’s marketing communication, establish the level of awareness by the SMMEs and to make suggestions that addressed the identified marketing communication challenges of the NWDC to SMMEs. The empirical research methods employed were exploratory, qualitative and quantitative. The population for the study comprised of all the SMMEs in the Mafikeng and Zeerust area that were registered (at the time) with the NWDC and were located in one of the NWDC Industrial Sites. A total of 82 completed questionnaires were collected by the researcher. The sample size comprised 58.6% of the total population. The study revealed that the SMMEs showed uncertainty with regards to their awareness of NWDC’s support services and communication levels. This was an indication that NWDCs marketing communication message was not effectively communicated to the SMMEs. Practical recommendations were made to the NWDC for implementation.

The objective of this research was to describe the dimensions of psychosocial malaise and the work values in physicians at two Ecuadorian hospitals. The research design was cross sectional. A convenience sample was composed by 169 physicians who completed a questionnaire to evaluate their psychosocial malaise and their work values (Schwartz, 2001). The results showed medium levels of somatization, exhaustion and alienation. Moreover the groups who work in critical departments showed highest levels of somatization, exhaustion and alienation. The values more frequent in physicians with high levels of somatization, exhaustion and alienation are selftranscendence believes. It’s significant that physicians share a philosophy and work values which have built around values as self-transcendence because their Hippocratic profession and service vocation

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