Modeling Direct & Indirect Effects of Cultural Diversity

Cultural diversity can have both positive and negative effects on the performance of multinational teams. Positive effects can stem from the wide variety of experiences and methods that a culturally diverse team can draw on to plan and to develop innovative or efficient solutions to a complex problem. However, cultural diversity can also lead to miscommunications and misunderstandings during task execution. In a complex task involving separate planning and execution phases, it is hypothesized that cultural diversity promotes better strategy and richer ideas arising from the interaction of the team as a whole during the planning phase. Further, it is hypothesized that potentially positive effects from good planning can be partially countered in the execution phase since cultural diversity can lead to poorer communications and misunderstandings which arise from the many separate one-on-one conversations which take place during postplanning execution. This paper examines both direct and indirect effects of diversity. It also proposes a model incorporating competing mechanisms in order to understand performance in culturally diverse teams. Challenges to agent-based simulation in order to instantiate the model are discussed. These include the indexing of cultural diversity, and the simulation of planning and agent-communication effects. Results of the simulation are compared to data from human multinational teams engaged in a complex task.