From confusion to cohesion: Cultural diversity, team interaction and perceived team performance in the community immersion experiences of Ghanaian undergraduate students

Abstract

Multicultural competence is increasingly named as a graduate attribute in African higher education, yet there is little evidence on how culturally diverse student teams actually work together in community-embedded learning, or on how that diversity bears on the work they produce. This article addresses that silence through the Third Trimester Field Practical Programme (TTFPP) of the University for Development Studies, Ghana, a mandatory, credit-bearing, two-year programme in which interprofessional and multiethnic student teams live and work in rural communities for seven to eight weeks in each of their first two academic years, without a resident university supervisor. Cultural Dynamic Framework, Group Development Theory, Experiential Learning Theory and Social Learning Theory guided this study. Drawing on a hermeneutic phenomenological study of ninety-three participants—comprising fifty-four students across eight focus group discussions, thirty-five students in individual in-depth interviews, and four programme coordinators and supervisors—the article examines how cultural diversity shapes teamwork dynamics and perceived team performance. Data were analysed through interpretative phenomenological analysis structured by reflexive thematic analysis. Two themes are reported. Diversity navigated over time captures: a temporal arc from fragmentation to cohesion that participants and coordinators independently located around the fourth week of immersion; an inter-year arc in which Year 2 teams began from a qualitatively stronger relational position than they had occupied in Year 1; disciplinary diversity as an analytical asset preceded by disciplinary friction; and the reciprocal negotiation of gendered and religious obligation. Performance shaped by cultural orientation captures: the assessment framework as an accountability mechanism for inclusive participation; and community elders as culturally legitimate mediators of intra-team conflict. The paper argues that a team's orientation to its diversity, rather than the amount of diversity it contains, is what participants associate with performance, and that in residential community immersion the host community is a co-producer of team cohesion rather than its backdrop.