How does cultural intelligence help to lessen the impact of stereotypes in multicultural teams? : focusing on stereotypes about students from China and the UK

The establishment of multicultural teams is an increasingly pervasive phenomenon in many companies. However, the diverse cultural identities carried by employees do not always give rise to satisfied outcomes. Stereotype, being an issue caused by cultural diversity, has negative influence on multicultural teams and multicultural team performance. Cultural intelligence, with its power in mitigating the negative effect brought about by cultural diversity, is studied in this research to see how it may help to lessen the negative influence of stereotypes to fill in the gap of current studies. For better implementation, this research selects students from Lancaster University Management School and focuses on stereotypes about students from China and the UK. The results show that stereotypes still exists in multicultural teams whose team members have developed cultural intelligence to an extent. The results also suggest that cultural intelligence do help to alleviate the negative influence of stereotypes for team members in multicultural teams in three ways. The results have both theoretical and practical significance