Cultural Diversity in Semi-Virtual Teams: A Multicultural Esports Team Study

Bio

Zhenzhen Xie is an associate professor in the Department of Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Strategy in the School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University. She received her PhD degree from the Department of Management in Hong Kong Unviersity of Science & Technology. Her research interests include the international business, innovation, and emerging economies. Her research has appeared in Management Science, Journal of International Business Studies, Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Management International Review, and Journal of International Management, among others.

Abstract

Does cultural diversity undermine team performance? We use the prism of esports and insights from virtual identity research and social categorization theory to determine the effect on semi-virtual teams in which member interaction is not necessarily mediated or constrained by physical world sociocultural norms. The common ground that has developed in esports results in a superordinate, culture-free gamer identity that transcends the virtual and the physical worlds, thus multicultural teams can enjoy the benefits of diverse knowledge without suffering unduly from social disintegration when gamer identity is salient--a reality challenged less in the virtual world than in the physical one. We conduct an empirical study using data from 4,035 League of Legends games played by 102 multicultural teams from 2017 to 2020. Our results show that cultural diversity improves the quality of team strategy when gamer identity becomes more salient, and that that may come about when players are intensely exposed to the game world, when they play with many different virtual characters, and when they play at home court.