Psychological factors surrounding disagreement in multicultural design team meetings

Our research contrasts two theories of creativity in multicultural teams. The dual-process model focuses on the degree of diversity, whereas cross-cultural psychology focuses on specific cultural compositions. In individualistic cultures, team members express more conflicts and benefit from it, compared to in collectivistic cultures that emphasise harmony. The relative representation of members from these cultures may affect team dynamics, conflict and creativity. We coded over 3100 speaker turns in the 11th Design Thinking Research Symposium data-set for the presence of disagreements and examined the effects of conflict phase and team diversity on creativity, promotion and prevention approaches using Linguistic Inquiry Word Count measures. We found that micro-conflicts increased insight words in the moment of the conflict. Individuals in more diverse team meetings of Scandinavians and South-East Asians expressed fewer conflicts than teams dominated by Scandinavians and were less likely to focus on potential gains when experiencing micro-conflicts. Regardless of conflict, the more culturally diverse teams were more likely to use insight and promotion words overall. There were no effects for prevention. These findings extend extant theory to different types of heterogeneous teams in a real-world design setting. This study is novel in combining theory on team cultural diversity with a micro-process method.