Glance around your workplace and you’re likely to see colleagues from other countries, and perhaps other continents.
While you may have given some thought to how someone’s country of origin may influence many kinds of interactions – from how honest to be with feedback, to what people tend to do for lunch at work – we don’t always consider how it shapes who we view as a potential leader.
However, our research shows that, in multinational teams, nationality does factor into our perceptions of leadership, often in ways we might not even realise. This unconscious bias can be a serious barrier to creating more inclusive workplaces.
If we look around the office and see people from, for instance, Spain, Brazil, Germany, Colombia and the US, we might tend to think of the Americans and Germans as natural leadership material, even if their country of origin has nothing to do with the job at hand. These particular individuals may well be strong potential leaders, but perhaps there are other factors at play in making this judgement.
To understand these factors, we observed multinational, self-managed teams. All members held an equal position, and were required to take on leadership roles for different tasks. In theory, anyone could act as a leader, depending on the task. But in reality, we found that team members tended to rate each other’s leadership readiness along nationality lines.
How nationality impacts two key traits: warmth and competence
To interpret the dynamics at work in our experiment, we looked at two characteristics that are key to effective leadership: “warmth” and “competence”.
Warmth encompasses traits such as trustworthiness, sincerity and friendliness – we tend to like and empathise with people we find warm.
Competence, on the other hand, is tied to having superior knowledge, skills and abilities. Team members perceived as competent receive more positive evaluations and are given more leadership opportunities within the team, and their opinions are given greater weight in team decisions.
Not surprisingly, people found team members of their own nationality to be warmer, or easier to connect with. This is because of what social scientists call “homophily” (which literally means “love of sameness”), referring to our natural tendency to associate and bond with people similar to ourselves in some way. Homophily is especially potent when we first meet someone – because of the shared nationality, those people immediately become “in-group” members in our minds.
However, for perceptions of competence, the picture was more complex. We discovered that people tended to relate competence with the degree of development of a person’s home country: people from higher-status countries were considered more competent than those from lower-status countries. We used the United Nations’ Human Development Index for country rankings.
Basically, nationality served as a status marker. That’s good news for employees from places such as the U.S. and Europe, who we may assume have had access to better education, healthcare and other social resources. Even within Europe, that’s good news for the Germans and Norwegians in your group, but not so much for those from Poland or Albania.
These results actually surprised us. When we started the research, we hypothesised that people would view peers from their same cultural cluster as representative of a positive group prototype, and look to them as potential leaders. Returning to the idea of homophily, we believed people would prefer “in-group” members with a shared nationality as their boss, rather than “out-group” members from a different country.
As it turned out, we didn’t find a correlation between being from the same country and feeling that someone was more competent and would make a better leader. On the contrary, we detected competition for leadership positions – rather than mutual support – among people from the same country.
What this means in the workplace
Cross-border movement means teams are becoming more multinational. And with the post-COVID surge in remote work and other enabling technologies, teams may have members scattered across the globe.
Companies shouldn’t treat nationality as a neutral biographical detail, akin to an ID number or address. It profoundly impacts not only our identities but also our teams, especially as we work toward more ethical and inclusive organisational practices. Companies should be aware that nationality has implications for effective teamwork, for fairness in career advancement, and for the distribution of power in organisations.
At the end of the day, any team member, whether they come from Switzerland or South Sudan, should be judged on their actual competence for leading, rather than the perceptions of competence linked to their countries of origin.
