By bringing team members with different cultural backgrounds together, teams in international business can benefit from cultural diversity and reach higher levels of performance. Cultural diversity also brings challenges, however, and diversity research has identified the need to consider moderating influences in the diversity–performance relationship. Team leadership should be particularly important in this respect and drawing on a theoretical analysis that puts an understanding of cultural diversity center stage, we propose that factors that reflect leaders’ experience with cultural diversity positively moderate the relationship between cultural diversity and team performance. We identify leader cultural background (local vs. foreign to the host culture) and leader team tenure as such factors. We predict that the influence of team nationality diversity (a form of cultural diversity) on team performance is more positive with a leader who is foreign to the host country than with a local leader, and with a leader with longer team tenure. In addition, we predict that the one moderating influence substitutes for the other, such that the effect of leader cultural background is stronger for leaders with shorter tenure with the team. Results from a survey of N = 66 teams (N = 336 individuals) from a multinational company support these hypotheses and inform our discussion of ways forward in the study of leadership and team diversity.

通过将具有不同文化背景的团队成员召集在一起，国际业务团队可以从文化多样性中受益并达到更高的绩效水平。文化多样性也带来了挑战，然而，多样性研究已经确定了需要考虑缓和多样性与绩效关系中的影响的必要性。在这方面，团队领导尤为重要，并应借助理论分析来理解文化多样性的中心位置，我们认为反映领导者文化多样性经验的因素可以积极地缓和文化多样性与团队绩效之间的关系。我们确定领导者的文化背景（东道国文化对本地文化还是外国文化）和领导团队的任期是这些因素。我们预测，团队国籍多样性（一种文化多样性）对团队绩效的影响，与在东道国外国的领导者相比，与本地领导者和团队任期更长的领导者相比，更为积极。此外，我们预测，一个人的影响力可以替代另一个人，因此，领导者文化背景对于在团队中任职时间较短的领导者的影响更大。一项调查结果 一家跨国公司的N  = 66个团队（N = 336个人）支持这些假设，并为我们在领导力和团队多样性研究中的前进方式提供了讨论。