Modern work teams are increasingly characterized by diverse cultural backgrounds. Research has established that cultural diversity holds the potential to enhance team performance through information elaboration—the exchange, discussion, and integration of task-relevant information. Recognizing that existing studies have studied information elaboration as an undifferentiated process, disregarding potential within-team differences in elaboration, we argue that differentiating between cross-culture information elaboration (elaboration between culturally dissimilar members) and within-culture information elaboration (elaboration between culturally homogenous members) within teams adds theoretical precision to our understanding of the role of information elaboration in culturally diverse teams. We propose that cross-culture elaboration is more strongly related to team performance than within-culture elaboration as well as that team member learning orientation stimulates cross-culture elaboration more than within-culture elaboration. In a survey of 104 teams, we found the predicted stronger influence of cross-culture information elaboration and the stronger indirect effect of team member learning orientation on team performance via team cross-culture information elaboration.
