Cultural Brokerage and Creative Performance in Multicultural Teams

This paper presents a novel theoretical framework of how members of multicultural teams leverage their diverse knowledge to produce creative outcomes. I develop and test a model of cultural brokerage, which I define as the act of facilitating interactions between actors across cultural boundaries. I find that team members with multicultural backgrounds engage in cultural brokerage on behalf of monocultural team members. Among multiculturals, 'cultural insiders' (those whose cultural background overlaps with other team members') brokered by integrating knowledge from different cultures, whereas 'cultural outsiders' (those whose cultural background has no overlap with any other team members') brokered by eliciting knowledge from different cultures. Both integrating and eliciting significantly enhanced creative performance at the team level. These findings advance our understanding of the process of creativity in culturally diverse teams. Open Access Statement: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You are free to download this work and share with others for any purpose, even commercially if you distribute your contributions under the same license as the original, and you must attribute this work as 'Organization Science. Copyright [c] 2017 The Author(s). https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1162, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.' Keywords: cultural brokerage * multicultural teams * cultural diversity * creativity * multicultural individuals * cultural overlap
Introduction Multicultural teams are becoming increasingly prevalent and important as tools for creative collaboration. Against the backdrop of accelerating globalization, organizations ranging from Pixar (Solomon 2016) to NASA (Montagnon 2012) [...]