Overcoming Cultural Status Disadvantage in Multicultural Teams: The Role of Leader Global Identity

Description

Globalization has led to increasing numbers of multinational corporations (MNCs) and multicultural work groups. The coronavirus pandemic has only added new layers of uncertainty and complexity to an already-competitive and changing landscape of the global economy. Leaders capable of navigating and operating effectively in such an environment are one key for global success and are in higher demand than ever. In general, leaders enjoy higher status than their followers and this high status makes it easier for them to lead followers and the team effectively. However, leaders in a multicultural context may face a unique challenge that prior literature has not considered: they have lower cultural status (defined as the cultural prominence, respect, and influence; Chen et al., 2004) than their team members. This creates a theoretical and practical puzzle: does low cultural status of global team leaders negatively affect team effectiveness, and if so, what kind of leaders will be able to overcome the cultural status disadvantage? Integrating social identity theory with the input-process-outcome (IPO) model of team effectiveness, we predict that lower levels of leader cultural status will be associated with lower levels of team coordination and higher levels of status conflict. In turn, lower levels of team coordination and higher levels of status conflict will be associated with lower levels of team effectiveness. We then further identify leader global identity—that is, a leader’s sense of belonging to and identification with groups operating in the global work environment of MNCs (Shokef & Erez, 2015)—as a critical leader characteristic that attenuates the negative effect of low leader cultural status on team effectiveness. Specifically, we argue that the negative effect of low cultural status on team coordination (as well as the positive effect of low cultural status on status conflict) are attenuated when levels of global identity are high rather than low. We propose a multi-wave, multi-source field study to test our model with 200 teams from an MNC. Our work opens up a novel line of study in multicultural research that has important practical implications for the type of leaders MNCs may hire, as well as how global leaders with differing levels of cultural status should behave in order to lead effectively in a multicultural team context.