Recent Evidence on Cross-National Teams
Managing cross-national teams is one of the hardest tasks of global managers. I summarize some important recent research on the topic.
I’ve been studying the strategy and management of multinational firms for over fifteen years now. I’ve taught classes on the topic with thousands of MBA students and corporate executives. One of the biggest challenges of being a global leader is effectively managing teams composed of people across multiple countries. This requires managing people representing different cultures, time zones, languages, skillsets, etc. Needless to say, it’s tough. I don’t have all the answers, but I try to stay close to the latest research on the topic. Here I summarize a few studies that offer useful insights. I hope you find them valuable. [Students who took my classes this semester (fall 2022) know about these studies already.]
Temporal Brokers: The Invisible Coordinators You Should Recognize and Reward
One of my favorite papers published within the last two years is “Bridging Temporal Divides: Temporal Brokerage in Global Teams and Its Impact on Individual Performance” by Julija Mell, Sujin Jang, and Sen Chai.
Temporal brokers are members of a global team that bridge subgroups with little or no overlap in time. The figure below, from the paper, shows how person P is a temporal broker. This is not a formal role, but individuals in this position are likely to take on more coordination work within the team because they have to link the activities, knowledge, and tasks of team members who don’t interact directly with one another. Anyone who’s worked in a cross-national team can relate to this. But what are the effects of being a temporal broker?
The authors conducted two studies, one with 4,553 individuals in global student project teams and the other with 123,586 individuals in global academic research teams. They found three important results:
Temporal brokers produce a lower quantity of output (because of the enhanced coordination workload).
However, temporal brokers product output of higher quality.
The higher quality of output arises because temporal brokers develop a higher level of “integrative complexity”. The concept that refers to the ability of individuals to think about issues and problems in a nuanced, flexible, and inclusive way. It is a measure of cognitive complexity that reflects an individual's capacity to consider multiple perspectives and integrate diverse viewpoints into their thinking and decision-making. In the context of global teams, integrative complexity can be particularly important for effective collaboration and decision-making, as it allows team members to consider the diverse perspectives of their colleagues from different cultural and geographic backgrounds.
I consider this a really important study because it has a few practical implications. First, recognize the extra coordination work that temporal brokers do. When assigning people to cross-national teams, leaders often take coordination work for granted but then fail to reward those doing the often invisible job of holding the team together. Second, expect that temporal brokers will be less productive in terms of quantity and adjust their job design accordingly. Third, harness the upside of integrative complexity by assigning tasks to temporal brokers that would most benefit from the variety of inputs and perspectives. For example, you might want to consider assigning creative tasks to temporal brokers instead of more routine or time sensitive tasks.
Remote Collaboration Produces Fewer Breakthrough Ideas
Remote work is all the rage. It has many benefits, as I’m sure you’ve read about ever since the COVID pandemic accelerated its adoption. But it’s not a panacea. A study titled “Remote Collaboration Fuses Fewer Breakthrough Ideas” by Yiling Lin, Carl Benedikt Frey, and Lingfei Wu documents one important downside pertaining to the production of radically new ideas.
The results are based on an analysis of coauthorship from a dataset of 20 million research articles and 4 million patents over the last fifty years. The two figures above summarize the main points nicely. One the left side, they document that the physical distance among collaborations has been increasing consistently since the 1960’s. This makes sense in light of the postwar integration of markets and the use of information and communication technologies.
The more interesting result is the one on the right of the figure: the greater the distance among collaborators, the less likely that the resulting idea is a breakthrough. A breakthrough idea is measured based on how a given discovery (research paper or patent) is subsequently cited. If subsequent work cites the focal work a lot but not the prior work cited by the focal work, the idea is more likely to be a breakthrough. If subsequenty work cites the prior work cited by the focal work more than the focal work, the idea is more likely to be an incremental discovery. This is a standard way to measure the breakthrough or radical nature of knowledge.
The application of these results is also quite practical. Your most innovative tasks require face-to-face interaction, so you want teams involved in such tasks to work close to one another. Remote work (at least for now) should be used for more routine work that involved well-understood knowledge.
Leaders with Broader Multicultural Experiences are More Effective
The final study I want to summarize is pretty self-explanatory based on the title: “Global Leaders for Global Teams: Leaders with Multicultural Experiences Communicate and Lead More Effectively, Especially in Multinational Teams.” The authors are Jackson Lu, Roderick Swaab, and Adam Galinsky. Based on four different studies, the authors document the following:
Study 1 is a field experiment of corporate managers. The results show that managers with broader multicultural experiences are rated as more effective leaders by their subordinates. This is the case because subordinates see multicultural leaders as commmunicating more effectively.
Study 2 is based on longitudinal dataset of English Premier League soccer managers (yay, more soccer!). The study replicates the positive effect of broad multicultural experiences from study 1. But it also shows that the effectivness of managers with broader multicultural increase the greater the national diversity of the players on the team.
Study 3 (a digital health hackathon) and study 4 (COVID-19 policy hackathon) replicate these effects in two field experiments. From an empirical standpoint, what’s nice about these two studies is that individuals with varying levels of multicultural experiences were randomly assigned to lead hackathon teams that varied in national diversity. So these results have a causal interpretation.
Once again, the results are quite practical because they inform how you should think about assigning managers to local vs. cross-national teams. The more cross-national the membership of the team, the more important it is to assign a manager with broad multicultural experience. That’s not the same as imply assigning a foreign-born or “international” manager—the breadth of their experience matters.
Please let me know if you’d like me to highlight any other recent studies
One of my goals with this newsletter is to offer the latest research on global business and management. If you come across any research I could point to in future editions, please send it to me. I also welcome your comments and questions.