Today we announce a working paper series of the eSports lab with the name “eSports Lab Universität Siegen Arbeitspapier”. We chose the German name for it, as it may be the case, that we will publish German results as well.
We start with”Assembling Intercultural Teams in Esports – Implications from the League of Legends European Championship” from Tobias M. Scholz
Abstract: In times of digitization, professional intercultural management is crucial for organizations. There are many ways to compose teams, but the picture of practical optimization techniques is still vague. Therefore, it appears reasonable to analyze new contexts outside the traditional business world. The meaning of esports (competitive gaming) is novel as it grew in the last decade exponentially and is gaining massive momentum. Furthermore, esports grew in a closed environment for a long time and is driven by a digital and global community. In this paper, we will analyze the popular game League of Legends and the impact of the cultural team optimization strategy. Additionally, to the team, we will also focus on the Coach as part of this process. The results will show that unique separable strategies focusing on cultural homogeneity or diversity can be observed. It becomes evident that some optimization patterns have a higher probability of success than others. Based on these results, we will focus on the League of Legends European Championship and derive a prediction formula for the success of the teams and test it in the spring and summer season in 2019. Finally, we will present implications for intercultural management.
Keywords: Intercultural management, international teams, cultural synergy, esports, cultural optimization
