Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth: Infobesity in Multicultural Firms During Covid-19

Abstract

Globalized firms maintain a presence across multiple countries encompassing multiple cultures. Cross-border, multicultural firms can leverage digital technologies to harness diverse information spread across the organization to generate insights and innovation. Conversely, digital technologies can cause organizations to suffer from infobesity. We examine this dialectic tension in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. We theorize that multicultural firms exhibited better performance, assessed through market measures, during the onset of the pandemic. We further maintain that the use of digital technologies to generate insights from data has a negative effect on the relationship between multiculturism and firm performance due to infobesity. Analysis of Fortune 500 firms, having 56,587 subsidiaries present in 179 distinct countries, demonstrates that multicultural firms witnessed relatively superior stock market returns during the first quarter of 2020. We make significant contributions to information systems and cross-cultural research and to broader inter-disciplinary management research.