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Culture and teams
Bradley L Kirkman1, Debra L Shapiro2, Shuye Lu2 and Daniel P McGurrin1
We first review research on culture effects in teams, illustrating
that mean levels of team cultural values have main (i.e. direct)
effects, indirect effects (i.e. mediated by intervening variables),
and moderating influences on team processes and outcomes.
Variance in team cultural values or on country of origin (i.e.
nationality diversity) also has main effects on team functioning,
and we highlight contextual variables that strengthen or
weaken these main effects. We next review research examining
the effect of variance in team cultural values on global virtual
teams, specifically. Finally, we review research on how cultural
values shape employees receptivity to empowering leadership
behavior in teams. We conclude by discussing critical areas for
future research.
Addresses
1 future research on culture and teams.
North Carolina State University, Poole College of Management,
Raleigh, NC 27695, USA
2
University of Maryland, Robert H. Smith School of Business, College
Park, MD 20742, USA
Corresponding author: Shapiro, Debra L (DShapiro@rhsmith.umd.edu)
Current Opinion in Psychology 2016, 8:137142
This review comes from a themed issue on Culture
Edited by Michele J Gelfand and Yoshihisa Kashima
For a complete overview see the Issue and the Editorial
Available online 14th December 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.12.001
2352-250X/Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Global competitive pressures associated with recruiting
and retaining employees, suppliers, distributors, and cus-
tomers have made organizations dependent on transna-
tional teams and virtual teams [1,2]. These teams
members are typically nationally-diverse or cultural-
ly-diverse [3]a and empowered by their leaders to make
a variety of self-managing decisions associated with the
a
Nationally-different employees or nationally-diverse teams (also
sometimes called multinational teams) refer to employees or team
members who come from, or reside in, different nations or countries
[1]. Culturally-diverse employees or team members are those who
hold different culturally-guided values, or beliefs, gained from ones
upbringing or background, that guide the meaning individuals attach to
the world around them, such as how people should act in a society
[1,5]. Distinguishing national-diversity versus cultural-diversity in
teams is important because within-country variance in cultural values
is possible and gets overlooked when studies use members nationality
as a proxy for cultural variation.
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complex work that they do. Despite these teams national
and/or cultural diversity, surprisingly little research on
understanding team effectiveness has been conducted
outside of North American and other Western (i.e., Aus-
tralian, Western European) contexts [4]. Globalization
requires a different approach to understanding how na-
tional culture affects the ability of team members to carry
out interdependent work. In this Current Opinion, we
describe recent developments in research on culture
and teams, with a special emphasis on: (a) culture effects
in teams; (b) culture effects in global virtual teams; and,
given these teams typically high level of autonomy, (c)
effects of empowering leader behavior (ELB) on teams
across cultures. We conclude with recommendations for
Studying culture effects in teams
There have been two primary approaches to incorporating
national culture when examining how team composition
influences team effectiveness. The first relies almost
exclusively on the use of survey-instruments to assess
mean levels of individually-held cultural values, such as
individualism-collectivism (i.e. beliefs about the impor-
tance of aiding individual versus group needs) and power
distance (i.e. beliefs about desired power differences
between authorities and subordinates) [6]. Mean-levels
of cultural values have been linked to team-dynamics as:
firstly, main (i.e. direct) effects; secondly, indirect effects
(i.e. mediated by intervening variables); and thirdly, as
moderators that strengthen or weaken main effects [7].
For example, scholars have found higher mean levels of
team collectivism are associated with higher levels of
team cooperation [810]. The positive effect of team
collectivism on team cooperation (as well as on team
empowerment and team productivity) is mediated by
the extent of team members resistance to working in
team- (rather than solo-) assignments [11], thereby sug-
gesting that positive main effects of this cultural value
depend on employees desire to work in teams. Addition-
ally, scholars have found that teams mean-level of col-
lectivism strengthens the tendency for higher team
efficacy to be associated with higher team performance
[12]. With regard to power distance, scholars have found
that higher mean levels of this in teams strengthen the
tendency for higher-status members expressed views to
influence a teams collective judgments [13]. Taken
together, these findings attest to the fact that team
functioning is influenced (in a variety of ways) by the
mean-level of teams cultural values.
The second primary approach to incorporating national
culture in examinations of team composition effects on
Current Opinion in Psychology 2016, 8:137142
138 Culture
team effectiveness relies on two methods for assessing the
diversity of team cultural values. The first method uses a
measure of variance on nation of origin (i.e. nationality
diversity), or what is referred to as a type of surface-level
diversity. The second approach uses a measure of vari-
ance on actual cultural values (i.e. cultural value diversi-
ty), or a type of deep-level diversity. A meta-analysis
including both methods of assessing cultural diversity in
teams (including 108 empirical studies and over
10 000 teams) shows that cultural diversity could have
both positive and negative effects on teams depending on
the specific criterion of interest [14]. For example,
cultural diversity is associated with team process losses
through its effects on increased task conflict [15] and
decreased social integration [16]. Yet, cultural diversity is
associated with process gains through its effects on in-
creased creativity [17] and team satisfaction [18]. Even
though these findings might suggest that cultural diversi-
ty is a double-edged sword, research has shown that when
team members recognize and respect cultural differences,
which is more likely in teams with high levels of cultural
intelligence, fusion teamwork [19] can occur that is
associated with positive team outcomes [20]. The
meta-analysis also shows that the criterion variable of
team communication effectiveness is helped (versus
harmed) by cultural variation in teams, depending on
how cultural variation gets assessed: variation in team
members cultural values generally aids this and mem-
bers national diversity generally harms this [14]. Thus,
scholars need to assess mediating variables, such as the
extent of fusion teamwork, and assess cultural variation in
teams via both methods reviewed here, not just one.
Team members nationality and cultural values are not
substitutes for each other.
Importantly, many of the main effect findings examined
in the meta-analysis are relatively small, suggesting mod-
erators [14]. Specifically, culturally diverse teams en-
counter more task conflict when tasks are complex,
members are face-to-face rather than virtual, and in teams
with longer tenure. These teams also have less effective
communication if they are larger and when members
spend more time together. Members are also less satisfied
in larger teams. Finally, there is lower social integration in
face-to-face, versus virtual, teams. Importantly, in North
American contexts, even though there is no relationship
between cultural diversity and conflict, the relationship is
significantly positive in non-North American contexts,
underscoring the importance of conducting more studies
outside North America and in non-Western countries.
Studying culture effects in global virtual teams
Despite the fact that research on global virtual teams has
been accumulating for over 20 years, there is still a lack of
attention to the role that cultural values play in virtual
team effectiveness [1,21]. For example, one important
question would be how could virtual teams effectively
Current Opinion in Psychology 2016, 8:137142
function with members who prefer to build strong inter-
personal relationships with their fellow team members
using face-to-face interaction? If virtual teams members
rarely (or never) meet face-to-face, the key component of
effective teamwork high quality relationships will
be lacking or, at best, more difficult to build for collecti-
vists.
The small amount of research that does exist on culture
and virtual teaming consistently examines cultural value
diversity. For example, U.S.Turkish virtual dyads are
much less effective the greater the differences in cultural
values; and, extending this to teams, team cultural com-
position is the most important predictor of team perfor-
mance [22]. Conversely, another study finds that
culturally heterogeneous virtual teams perform better
than culturally heterogeneous face-to-face teams, sug-
gesting that leaner technologies might reduce the poten-
tially negative effects of cultural biases, particularly early
in a teams lifespan [23]. And, yet another set of studies
finds no relationship between cultural value diversity and
virtual team outcomes such as learning, satisfaction, con-
flict, trust, and performance [24,25]. Clearly, the effect of
culture on virtual team functioning is complex, and
research has yet to identify how this relationship is
influenced by important contingency variables [1].
Reactions to empowering leadership across
cultures
Given the decision-complexity of their tasks, global and/
or virtual teams are usually self-managing [11] or, simi-
larly, empowered by leaders to make managerial deci-
sions associated with goal setting, performance-assessing,
and more [26]. Surprisingly, we know little about how
national or cultural value-differences influence employ-
ees receptivity to empowering leader behavior (ELB)
(see, also, the review on culture and leadership by
Hanges, Aikan, Park & Su, this issue). One study did
theorize and find that employees who are more receptive
to teamwork (rather than solo-work) tend to be more
collectivistic; and, that employees who are more receptive
to self-management (rather than being directed or highly
supervised) tend to be those whose cultural values are
lower in power distance and determinism, and higher in
doing orientation; and, employees resistance to self-
management and teamwork mediates the effect that
cultural values have on team effectiveness as measured
by cooperation, empowerment, and productivity [11].
Cumulatively, these findings suggest that employees
receptivity (or conversely, their resistance) to teamwork
involving ELBs differs across employees with differing
cultural values, hence across nationally-different employ-
ees. Future research is needed to test this, however, since
the measure that has been used to assess ELBs, including
the measures name, has varied across studies, making
knowledge-accumulation difficult. Specifically, the first
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such scale was called external leader behavior [26], an
instrument with similar purpose that was introduced
subsequent to this was called the empowering leadership
questionnaire (ELQ) [27], and after this another scale
was called leader empowerment whose substance
except for a self-referent rather than team-referent is
quite similar to the external leader behavior scale [28].
Conceptually, not only empirically, names have also
varied with regard to phenomena associated with empow-
ering employees. For example, when employees at all
levels (hence peers as well as authorities) engage in the
behaviors mentioned in these scales items, scholars
describe this as structural empowerment and empow-
ering climate [29,30] or, similarly, as leadership climate
[31]. Knowledge about employees receptivity to ELBs,
hence to managerial actions likely to characterize the
work of global teams, will more easily accumulate when
concepts and measures associated with these are more
standardized across studies.
The few studies that have assessed reactions to ELBs
since 2010 using participants from multiple countries and/
or that assessed participants cultural values have per-
tained to individuals (not teams) reactions. For example,
one study finds a stronger effect of empowering leader
behavior on feelings of psychological empowerment for
individuals who are from the U.S., rather than China [32],
a pattern also found in another study for individual team
members who are from Sweden rather than China [33].
Since the U.S. and Sweden are lower than China in power
distance [34], the latter findings suggest that the posi-
tive effects of empowering leader behaviors may be
stronger for employees with lower power distance. Even
though another study predicted the latter pattern, which
also compared Swedish and Chinese employees, no direct
effect of empowering leader behaviors was found a
result difficult to explain since there was no measure of
employees power distance [35]. However, the power
distanceempowering leadership link was supported by a
study of self-managing work teams, in that the self-
management aspect of this structure is generally resisted
more in teams with higher, rather than lower, power
distance (from Filipino employees rather than employees
from the U.S., respectively) [11]. This pattern makes
sense given that employees with high (but not low) power
distance ought to be more uncomfortable performing
tasks that are traditionally reserved for supervisors (e.g.
setting goals, allocating tasks, evaluating team members
performance), which is part of self-managing work [11,36]
and, thus also, part of the experiences comprising empow-
ered teams [26,37].
Even though cultural value-discrepancy is more likely
between rather than within countries [6], cultural value-
differences may occur among people of the same country.
How tight or loose a culture is refers to the extent to
which country-citizens tend to behaviorally match or
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Culture and teams Kirkman et al. 139
deviate from the values associated with their country,
respectively [38]. The possibility of varying levels of
within-country variance in cultural values reinforces our
previously noting that it behooves cross-cultural scholars
to assess team members cultural values in addition to
members national citizenship [7,11].
Conclusion and future directions
Taken together, our review leads us to draw several
important conclusions regarding culture and teams. First,
studies will ideally assess cultural variance by assessing,
both, cultural value diversity and variance in team mem-
bers nationality. Reasons for doing this include the fact
that, despite recent meta-analytic findings showing little
difference in effects on team processes and outcomes
[14], nationality captures a much broader array of po-
tential differences than do cultural values. If cultural
value diversity explains (i.e. fully mediates) nationality
diversity effects, one can conclude the effects are due to
culture; however, if values do not (or only partially)
mediate, then the effects are due to aspects of national
origin beyond culture. The non-substitutability of cultur-
al value-dispersion and nationality-diversity, and the fact
that findings are not always consonant with both of these
assessments, is why we (as well as other) scholars recom-
mend directly assessing cultural values, rather than using
nation as a proxy or assigning country level scores based
on nationality [7,39,40,41,42].
Second, studies will ideally assess contingency variables
when examining the effects of cultural value diversity.
Reasons supporting this include, for one, the relationship
between cultural value diversity and team processes and
outcomes is heavily influenced by moderators, such as
team size, length of time members have worked together,
complexity and structure of tasks, and whether members
work more so face-to-face or virtually [14,43]. Thus, not
incorporating contingency variables when examining cul-
tural diversity effects in teams will likely lead to equivocal
or un-interpretable results. And two, cultural diversity
could also serve as a moderator for a variety of other main
effect relationships involving teams [44]. An overem-
phasis on main effects parallels much of the research on
cultural values themselves, which has largely ignored
cultural values as moderators of individual, group/organi-
zational, and country level relationships [7]. In addition,
cultural value means and diversity are likely to play a joint
role in determining important team outcomes, and thus
both should be included in future research (and both are
typically calculated using individual team members
scores, so the data are always available) [5,45].
Our third conclusion is that the limited research on the
effects of culture on virtual teams presents a problem for
21st Century teams [1]. That is, because most global
teams have members that work remotely and from a
distance from one another, this is an area where practice
Current Opinion in Psychology 2016, 8:137142
140 Culture
has truly moved ahead of science. The few studies that
have examined culture and virtual teams find equivocal
results for the relationship between cultural diversity and
team processes and outcomes [1]. Perhaps this should
be expected as the cultural diversity meta-analysis
showed no direct relationship between cultural diversity
and team performance (using a sample including both
face-to-face and virtual teams) [14]. More research is
needed on moderators of cultural diversity effects in
virtual teams, considering both relationship determinants
and team practices [1]. Especially promising is attention
to cultural values dealing with the importance of relation-
ships and face-to-face interaction, as it is not at all clear
how those that value close interpersonal, face-to-face
relationships in teams (i.e. those in highly collectivistic
or particularistic societies) overcome this need in order to
make their virtual teams successful. We also strongly
encourage more qualitative approaches to understanding
how team members adapt to culturally diverse virtual
teams (DP McGurrin, Investigating shared norms in
multicultural teams: exploring how team member scripts
and cognitive adjustment strategies impact the norm
formation process, Doctoral dissertation, North Carolina
State University, 2015) [46].
Finally, we have very little understanding of how various
employees with different cultural values will react to
empowering team leadership behavior. Much of this
research has been conducted in the West, with much
less research focused on Eastern cultures
[47,48,49,50,51,52,53]. Even when such re-
search is conducted, cultural value measures are often
largely omitted. This is problematic because existing
research on cultural values more generally suggests that
empowering leader behaviors and empowerment may not
evoke positive reactions from employees or team mem-
bers with high (rather than low) power distance [39].
Research also needs to determine the effects of empow-
ering leadership behaviors in teams whose members
differ in their level of power distance, as is likely in
the multinational or transnational teams of the 21st cen-
tury workplace (described at our outset). Before embark-
ing on a program of such research, however, scholars will
ideally agree on which leader empowering behavior-
assessing instrument to use so that observations across
studies can accumulate.
Conflict of interest statement
Nothing declared.
References and recommended reading
Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review,
have been highlighted as:
 of special interest
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142 Culture
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that the extent of team leaders empowering behaviors was significantly
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49. Li N, Chiaburu D, Kirkman BL: Cross-level influences of
 empowering leadership on citizenship behavior:
organizational support climate as a double-edged sword. J
Manage 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/peps.12115. in press.
In a sample comprised of 461 Chinese employees in 98 teams from one
organization in the energy industry, this study found (among other things)
that psychological empowerment mediated the cross-level relationship
between team-directed empowering leadership and two complementary
types of individual-level citizenship behavior (OCB), including affiliative
OCB and taking charge. For affiliative OCB, the highest levels occurred
when both empowering leadership and support climate were high. In
contrast, for taking charge, the highest levels occurred when empowering
leadership was high but when support climate was low.
50. Magni M, Maruping LM: Sink or swim: empowering leadership
 and overload in teams ability to deal with the unexpected.
Hum Resour Manage 2013, 52:715-739.
In a sample comprised of 48 teams from two large European firms, this
study found a complex three-way interaction such that team performance
was highest when members perceived more empowering leader-beha-
viors in conjunction with a greater ability to improvise during unexpected
work events and a lesser degree of overload.
Current Opinion in Psychology 2016, 8:137142
51. Menguc B, Auh S, Uslu A: Customer knowledge creation
 capability and performance in sales teams. J Acad Market Sci
2013, 41:19-39.
In a sample comprised of 259 employees from 80 sales teams in a Turkish
manufacturing company, this study found (among other things) that the
extent of empowering leader-behaviors was significantly positively asso-
ciated with the quality of sales teams customer relationships and finan-
cial performance.
52. Tung HL, Chang YY: Effects of empowering leadership on
 performance in management teams: mediating effects of
knowledge sharing and team cohesion. J Chin Hum Resour
Manage 2011, 2:43-60.
In a sample comprised of 79 management teams in a major international
fast-food chain restaurant operating in Taiwan, this study found (among
other things) that the extent of empowering leader-behaviors was sig-
nificantly positively associated with team performance.
53. Wu LZ, Wei LQ, Lau CM: TMT educational and functional
 background diversity, team mechanisms and firm
performance: the moderating role of CEO empowering
leadership. Acad Manage Proc 2010:1-6.
In a sample of 469 top management team (TMT) members from
133 Chinese firms, the tendency for TMTs educational-diversity
and functional background-diversity to be negatively associated with
team process-mechanisms (i.e. collective identification and learning)
and, in turn, firm performance was stronger when TMT members
perceived their CEOs engagement in empowering behaviors to be
low rather than high.
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