Cultural Diversity in Team Conversations: A Deep Dive into its Effects on Cohesion and Team Performance

Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) is a 21st-century skill essential for learning, workplace success, and tackling increasingly complicated global problems. Team diversity is vital during collaborative activities, especially in a digital space. Although CPS involves dynamic communication behaviors, few studies have considered the impact of cultural diversity on the complex and reoccurring discourse involved in CPS tasks. In this study, we explore team conversations during a CPS task of N = 129 groups of 4 undergraduate students in order to understand the role and the impact of cultural diversity on team cohesion and how cohesion can explain the relationship between cultural diversity and team performance. First, we provide a novel measure of team cohesion using the semantic similarity between each pair of messages within the conversation. To achieve this, we used a pre-trained MP-Net model to embed sentences semantically into a vector space and then used cosine similarity as a similarity measure. We then use the average semantic similarity value as a measure of cohesion and social integration. Finally, we used the analysis of variance to statistically compare the cohesion values of groups with different levels of cultural diversity. Moreover, we conducted a mediation analysis between cultural diversity and performance with cohesion as a mediator. Our results suggest that the more diverse groups are associated with lower cohesion in their group conversations. Furthermore, the mediation analysis suggests that there is no direct relationship between cultural diversity and performance, as well as a lack of an indirect relationship explained through cohesion. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings and how they relate to group processes; and the future research directions for the Cognitive Science community.