Conflict management in culturally diverse teams : the role of cognitive biases

Abstract

This research is relevant and important to assist managers in communicating with their culturally diverse team efficiently and to avoid internal conflicts by exploring cultural dimensions and their relations to cognitive biases. This study takes into account the ideas of current or former managers of culturally diverse teams who explore these differences. With the help of an online survey and interviews, the impact of culture on cognitive bias is explored and compared with former results in the literature to fill in a knowledge gap. This study provides valuable insights concerning general characteristics influencing culture and cognitive biases and, therefore, the communication in the team. More research can easily be built on these results and parts of the study can be replicated. While results are coherent even in different contexts and with different sample sizes, the outcome was found to be less dependent on the country of residence but on the country of education, age, religion, nationality, language, gender and the topic that was communicated about. This adds more dimensions that have been disregarded by many previous studies which resulted in the sample being split into irrelevant cultural groups. For instance, comparing different groups depending on their country of residence provides less accurate results as the residence is not a major characteristic that has an impact on an individual’s culture. This can be improved and adjusted. Only about half of the proposed cognitive biases actually presented a relationship with culture which alters some of the former assumptions in the literature. During the interviews most ideas found in previous studies were confirmed, however, more ideas were proposed by the participants. Analysis of use depending on cultural dimensions became more visible through this study and might help teams in the future to find the right directions and bond with relevant actions.