Qualities of a Multicultural Employee that benefits IB workplaces (organisational level)

Question 1

Multicultural Employees are more creative (Hong & Doz, 2013)

Answer 1

• Bringing in multicultural individuals as managers can benefit business as they have flexible perspectives and can recognise new product opportunities.

Question 2

Multicultural Managers need to be used strategically to become valuable internal resources for the firm (Hong & Minbaeva, 2022)

Answer 2

Multicultural managers should be used in:
- new product development (great creativity; combining knowledge from different culture to develop new innovative products).
- international recruitment (social networks in different countries; in-group identification with people from different countries)
- international marketing (consumer preferences in multiple markets)

Question 3

How do multicultural employees make multicultural teams more creative? (Jang et al., 2017)

Answer 3

• MBI & Multicultural employees: multicultural managers are seen as more superior in developing creative ideas (integrating phase):
• cultural broker (1): cultural insider shared the culture of the team members (more involved in integrating cultural differences; drawing on their own cultural knowledge to come up with the unique ideas)
• cultural broker (2): cultural outsider did not share the culture of the team members (more involved in eliciting information; asking questions to draw out the cultural knowledge of each team member; what rituals they have and build on those answers given)

Question 4

Multicultural employees can make better strategic decisions (Hong & Doz, 2013)

Answer 4

Soccer teams with multicultural head coaches outperformed teams with monocultural head coaches, in the World Cup (Szymanski, Fitzsimmons, & Danis, 2019). It’s important to have multicultural head coaches in the World Cup because the multicultural head coaches have more knowledge about different cultures in the World Cup and the styles in the World Cup would vary more than in the Regional Qualifier. The Regional Qualifier would include teams from the same country, hence similar cultural behaviours, perspective,for planning out winning (game) strategies.

Question 5

Multicultural employees have a more diverse social network (Fitzsimmons, Liao, & Thomas, 2017)

Answer 5

A monocultural individual’s in-group has a higher ratio of people from their own cultures, whereas a highly multicultural individual’s in-group has a higher ratio of people from other cultures (this study was conducted within a hospital context).

Question 6

What is the benefit of good social connections in global organisations (IB context)?

Answer 6

This is relevant to organisations because MNCs (global corporations) needs its managers to make genuine connections with people from subsidiaries, other corporations, and can increase information sharing or knowledge (i.e., advice, opinion), which increases the efficiency of operations. good social connections within the organisation means you can get help for problems much faster as your connection can directly refer you to the person you need help from, instead of you having to request & wait for help from someone through (formal) levels of hierarchy. It’s also beneficial for building trust, which means you can request favours & they can reciprocate these favours, which can benefit your work. When international managers/ employees have diverse social networks, spanning across different departments/ countries/regions, organisations (and employees) benefit from increased efficiency,