Leadership in Multicultural Teams : Impact of Highly Educated & Multicultural Creative Teams on Leadership

With a rapidly changing work environment due to increased migration and ease of travel, organisations today is challenged by a multicultural setting of individuals in employment. Additionally there is an increase in the number of highly educated employees working in the same teams as lesser educated individuals. The purpose of this paper is to research how the leadership is influenced by the cultural and educational diversity in a team. The study is a comparison study between two demographically similar teams in the same organisation. The difference between teams is that one team comprises of highly educated individuals classified under creative class based on Richard Florida's (2002) workforce classification. The other team comprises of individuals with lower education and are classified under service class. This research has found that the leadership is influenced in a different way when the level of education is included in the multicultural teams. Thus, besides culture, education also plays a big part in how the leadership is impacted.