Global organizational communities of practice: The effects of nationality diversity, psychological safety, and media richness on community performance
研究全球组织实践社群中国籍多样性与绩效的U型关系，发现心理安全感和丰富沟通媒体能缓解多样性初期的负面影响并增强后期的正面效应，对跨国企业知识管理有指导意义。
Organizational communities of practice (OCoPs) are used increasingly to capitalize on valuable distributed knowledge and to fully engage the innovation potential of employees. OCoPs have become increasingly global in their reach, relying of necessity on virtual forms of interaction to engage the participation and expertise of a global workforce. An unanswered question is whether the performance of such global OCoPs may be predicted to benefit or suffer owing to their nationality diversity. Using data from over 200 members of 30 global OCoPs in a Fortune 100 US-based multinational mining and minerals processing firm, we found that nationality diversity was curvilinearly (U-shaped) related to community performance. We also found that the curvilinear relationship was moderated by psychological safety and the extent of rich communication media use. Specifically, the arc relating nationality diversity and performance became more positive at the higher end, and less negative at the lower end, to the extent that communities reported higher psychological safety and richer communication media use.