Team Leadership and Team Cultural Diversity: The Moderating Effects of Leader Cultural Background and Leader Team Tenure

By bringing team members with different cultural backgrounds together, teams in international business can benefit from diversity and reach higher levels of performance. Cultural also brings challenges, however, research has identified the need to consider moderating influences diversity–performance relationship. Team leadership should be particularly important this respect drawing on a theoretical analysis that puts an understanding center stage, we propose factors reflect leaders’ experience positively moderate relationship between We identify leader background (local vs. foreign host culture) tenure as such factors. predict influence nationality (a form diversity) performance is more positive who country than local leader, longer tenure. In addition, one substitutes for other, effect stronger leaders shorter team. Results survey N = 66 ( 336 individuals) multinational company support these hypotheses inform our discussion ways forward study diversity.