Who is multicultural? How to define it, measure it, and study it in international business

What is it about?

Employees within an organization are increasingly likely to have had multicultural experiences that influence the way they behave, interact with others, and make decisions in the workplace. It is dawning on scholars and practitioners that multicultural employees bring unique benefits to organizations. But who really is a multicultural employee? This interdisciplinary review develops a unifying conceptualization of individual-level multiculturalism and recommends how to measure it. The authors of this paper reviewed conceptualizations of individual-level multiculturalism from anthropology, management, marketing, psychology, and sociology in order propose a unifying tridimensional conceptualization; they define it as the degree to which an individual has knowledge of, identifies with, and has internalized more than one societal culture.

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Photo by Slava Bowman on Unsplash

Photo by Slava Bowman on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The article offers new directions for international business research, looking at cross-level implications of individual-level multiculturalism for international organizations, through the lens of social networks and power dynamics.