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Introduction
The popularity of transnational, virtual and global work teams continues to increase their use within multinational corporations to coordinate activities across the entire organization. Many work teams are composed of members from a variety of cultural backgrounds because of the increasing global reach and cultural diversity of organizations. These teams need to be able to work together effectively and constructively to complete the complex tasks that can often times influence the organization’s operations in multiple different locations and/or functional areas. Cultural differences are often times seen as a liability (Ikegami et al., 2017) or as the source of difficulties and obstacles that can cause incompatibility, friction and conflict (Stahl et al., 2017). However, work teams are often times expected to achieve innovative and creative outcomes (Janssens and Brett, 2006), with little opportunity to develop a shared value system, behavioral codes or a hybrid team culture (Earley and Mosakowski, 2000).
Cultural intelligence (CQ) refers to knowledge, skills and abilities that together provide individuals with the abilities to adapt to new and unfamiliar cultural environments and effectively interact in culturally diverse situations (Earley and Ang, 2003; Thomas et al., 2008). It has been widely accepted as a measurable set of skills that identifies individuals with the abilities to constructively interact with others in spite of cultural differences. Within the context of teams, individual-level CQ is important for each member of a team, particularly for teams that are multicultural or that have a high level of cultural heterogeneity. Individual team members’ CQ has been found to impact the quality of teamwork (Scholz, 2012), individual-level performance (Presbitero and Toledano, 2018), transformational leadership (Crowne, 2019) and group-level team performance (Khani et al., 2011). CQ is also relevant at the team-level where deficiencies in some members’ CQ can be counterbalanced by other members’ CQ (Adair et al., 2013). Team-level CQ, although theoretically argued to be an important aspect of teams (Adair et al., 2013), has rarely been examined as an outcome of working in culturally diverse teams and, further, its role as an influencer of team performance has received scare attention. Therefore, our research question is:
How does working in culturally diverse teams influence team-level CQ development and how does team-level CQ influence...