Although many large companies are multinational, most of the top management teams (TMTs) in these companies are not. They tend to be dominated by executives with a connection to the home country of the company. Attention is paid to gender diversity, but cultural diversity is often ignored.

One must first agree that there are some benefits to having mono-cultural TMTs (i.e., all coming from the same nationality and speaking the same language). Since mono-cultural teams share assumptions, world views, and language, communication between them is efficient. This speeds up decision making and reduces conflict among team members. Anyone who has participated in culturally diverse teams has encountered problems on these fronts.

Benefits of cross-cultural teams surpass drawbacks only when the organization has multinational operations. In this context, cross-cultural teams have three crucial advantages.

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