Performance effects of interaction between multicultural managers and multicultural team members: Evidence from elite football competitions

Multicultural employees are an important organizational demographic and a subject of increasing interest in the literature on international management; however, few studies assess how multiculturals affect team performance. We first collect individual performance data for 442 individuals from 20 teams led by monocultural and multicultural managers. We then collect team-level performance data for 269 teams with varying proportions of multicultural individuals. The results confirm that multicultural individuals performed better in teams with multicultural managers and that teams led by multicultural managers outperformed teams with the same percentage of multicultural individuals led by monocultural managers.