Multicultural Synergy and Team Performance: The Mediating Role of Cultural Integration In Malaysian Universities

This study examines the relationship between team performance and subjective well-being in multicultural organizational contexts, and the mediating role of cultural integration in these relationships. Existing research highlights that understanding well-being is essential in enhancing team outcomes, yet limited studies have explored this link across diverse work settings. These findings support using well-being as a significant predictor when evaluating performance, helping identify how subjective well-being contributes to improved team performance through cultural integration. This study produced 400 valid responses using a quantitative survey. Descriptive statistics, multiple regression analysis, and mediation analysis were used to test the hypotheses and validate direct and indirect interactions between the variables. The well-being framework, rooted in capabilities approaches and examined by international experts, was used in this study to understand subjective well-being. The study's findings reveal that the well-being variables Life Satisfaction, Flourishing, and Domain Evaluation significantly affected Team Performance. The mediation analysis results indicated that cultural integration mediates the relationships among all four constructs of well-being and team performance. Overall, the findings confirm that team performance is strengthened when employees experience high levels of subjective well-being and cultural integration is effectively fostered within the team. This study adds to the knowledge corpus by offering suggestions for predicting the effectiveness of a multicultural workforce by providing empirical evidence supporting the integration of well-being and cultural diversity in organisational performance models.