Global organizational communities of practice: The effects of nationality diversity, psychological safety, and media richness on community performance

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.