National and cultural diversity in global innovation teams creativity and innovation as a function of cultural team composition

As global companies use teams to pursue innovations research has paid increasing attention to team functioning. For global innovations firms often rely on multi-cultural innovation teams (MCITs) with members from different national backgrounds to gain easy and fast access to consumer and market knowledge. We conducted a two year longitudinal study on five MCITs at a large consumer good company, BLUE. In 105 interviews we found cultural differences and the cultural composition of the team to be the source of 36 percent of the reported difficulties. We focus on diversity of communication styles and values as well as their effect on team work quality dimensions which are linked to the innovativeness of teams. We derive a model stressing differences between diversity in communication styles and cultural values.