The Rise of Multicultural Managers | INSEAD Knowledge

A good overview by INSEAD academics of some of the advantages for larger companies of multicultural managers and leaders, and some of the advantages:

• “Making creative associations and drawing analogies between geographical markets, allowing L’Oreal to develop global products and build global brands while remaining sensitive to local market differences.
• Interpreting complex knowledge – i.e. tacit, collective and culture-dependent, hence impossible to simply “explain” across cultures and contexts, an essential skill when marketing products like cosmetics, where much of understanding is tacit and culture-dependent.
•  Anticipating cross-cultural conflicts, and addressing them, something critical to the effectiveness of global teams.
•  Integrating new team members from different cultures into teams that quickly develop their own norms of interaction and a strong “in or out” identity, making joining the team once it has been in existence for a while particularly difficult.
• Mediating the relationship between global teams, with a high level of cultural diversity among their members, and the senior executives they report to, or their interaction with local subsidiary staff they collaborate with, who are usually monocultural.”

The Rise of Multicultural Managers | INSEAD Knowledge.