The Rise of Multicultural Managers | INSEAD Knowledge
2013/07/27 2 Comments
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.”