Foreign (i.e., non-citizen) workers face significant challenges concerning socialization and belonging in the workplace. This research investigates (1) the identity-related challenges of self-initiated expatriate workers and (2) how self-initiated expatriate workers navigate identity-related challenges in their cultural adaptation process. Data were collected through a series of 24 semi-structured interviews with self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) living and working abroad in Japan. Findings revealed that SIEs were challenged with job taint, perceived prejudice, and acculturative stress in their organizations. SIEs navigated these challenges through an avoiding stigma management communication strategy, an integrative acculturative strategy, and the prioritization of their career satisfaction and development. Participants who used these strategies had more adaptive sociocultural outcomes and life satisfaction. This study contributes to occupational identity and job taint literature the novel concept of transient job taint , a form of job taint that specifically applies to foreign worker populations. Theoretical and practical implications conclude the paper.
Expatriate underperformance remains a persistent challenge for multinational corporations and a central concern in cross-cultural management scholarship. Yet existing research still offers limited explanation of how intercultural capabilities are transformed into effective performance in culturally complex work settings. Drawing on Conservation of Resources theory, this study examines how cultural intelligence enhances cross-cultural performance through the sequential development of cross-cultural competence and psychological resilience. Survey data from 314 company-assigned expatriates across Taiwan, Europe, and North America were analysed using PLS-SEM and Hayes’ PROCESS Macro. The findings show that cultural intelligence positively predicts cross-cultural performance and that this relationship is partially mediated by cross-cultural competence and psychological resilience. Specifically, cultural intelligence strengthens expatriates’ cross-cultural competence, thereby enhancing psychological resilience and, in turn, improving cross-cultural performance. The study contributes to cross-cultural management scholarship by showing that effective cross-cultural performance is not simply the direct result of cultural intelligence, but a resource-building process through which intercultural, competence-based, and psychological resources accumulate. The findings also offer practical implications for expatriate selection, training, and support.
The Hispanic managerial workforce in the United States represents a rapidly growing demographic, yet research concerning the leadership behaviors and characteristics of Hispanic managers remains limited. This research underscores the importance of employing culturally appropriate and validated measurement instruments for assessing leadership within this unique demographic group. The validation of such instruments is pivotal for the advancement of comprehensive theories and frameworks tailored to Hispanic managers, fostering the development of inclusive and effective management practices. This study aims to assess the validity and reliability of the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ) in the context of Hispanic managers, recognizing potential cultural nuances that may impact leadership perceptions. Furthermore, it explores the influence of cultural dimensions, such as paternalismo, familismo, and collectivism, on authentic leadership within the Hispanic managerial population. Validating the ALQ in this population contributes to the generalizability of the instrument and facilitates its broader application in research and practice.
CQ is considered a capability associated with expatriates' functioning in new intercultural environments, shaped by individual experiences and social norms. This study explores how childhood family values are related to expatriates' CQ, emphasizing the interplay between early socialization, contextual differences, and workplace environments. This research contributes to the understanding of the deep antecedents of CQ's cognitive, metacognitive, behavioral, and motivational dimensions. The findings highlight the complex interactions between personal background and contextual factors, offering insights into variations in expatriates' intercultural capabilities and leadership. The study also underscores the importance of a nuanced approach to CQ development.
Understanding the mechanisms influencing job performance remains an important challenge in scientific research. This study examines the relationship between several psychosocial variables and job performance in two countries, India and Spain, with important cultural differences. Five variables (role conflict, role clarity, influence at work, workload, and work-related bullying) and two different cultural contexts (clan and market) are considered to lead to employee performance. This study uses fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) on two samples of industrial employees to conclude the combinations of conditions leading to job performance. The results show that in India, where clan cultures prioritize caring for employees, cooperation, and long-lasting relationships, the absence of destabilizing factors, such as workplace bullying or role conflict, is crucial for high employee performance. In Spain, where market cultures focus on results, productivity, and competitiveness, employee performance can be maintained even when work overload and job roles are unclear. The study’s results underline the importance of identifying the combinations of factors that lead to employee performance to help managers make decisions tailored to the cultural and industrial context. When considering different cultural contexts, job resources, job demands, and workplace bullying have different meanings in explaining employee performance.
Global migration has contributed to an increasingly multicultural workforce, yet studies suggest that immigrants are exploited and face discrimination in the United States labor market. While prior research has examined the workplace experiences of immigrant employees, little is known about the sense-making process of immigrant job applicants as they navigate the hiring process. This article addresses this gap by introducing a conceptual framework explaining why and how immigrant job applicants are vulnerable to exploitation, with a focus on their mode of acculturation. The framework also incorporates individual differences in recruiters’ cross-cultural attitudes, such as other-group orientation and human values, as conditional factors that could influence employers’ motivation to exploit immigrant applicants. The article concludes with practical implications, including guiding immigrants to adopt acculturation strategies that signal intercultural adaptation and dispel misconceptions about their resource capital and encouraging recruiters to engage in ethical training that fosters intercultural sensitivity in cross-cultural hiring processes. These insights advance understanding of immigrant exploitation and contribute to the broader literature on cross-cultural selection.
This study explores how professional language tutors working on a global digital platform navigate the challenges of platform work across culturally and economically diverse contexts. Drawing on grounded theory and interviews with tutors from emerging and developed economies, we develop a process model of how individuals respond to platform vulnerability, build adaptive resilience, and sustain professional identity in the absence of formal organizational structures. The findings reveal that tutors construct resilience through emotional regulation, cultural mediation, and relational engagement, enabling them to manage systemic demands and craft meaningful roles within algorithmically governed environments. We show that while core practices are shared, the meaning, motivation, and consequences of these strategies vary significantly across contexts. Tutors in emerging economies emphasize economic continuity and social positioning, while those in developed economies focus on autonomy and intrinsic purpose. This study contributes to cross-cultural management by theorizing how resilience and identity are enacted through culturally situated practices, and by illuminating the contextual conditions that shape agency in global platform work.
The aim of this study is to examine how professionals from Latin America working in Poland negotiate their cultural identities and make sense of their multiculturalism within organizational settings. Ten bicultural or multicultural individuals participated in in-depth interviews and created Cultural Identity Circles. Drawing on the frameworks of Bicultural Identity Integration and cultural identity styles, the findings indicate that across the sample, harmonious, blended, and hybridized identity styles were most prevalent among participants, with some individuals demonstrating multiple styles simultaneously. Alternating was less common, appearing mainly through contextual language switching. Moreover, within organizational contexts, multiculturalism was largely perceived as an asset. Participants drew on multilingualism, cultural bridging, and relational warmth rooted in Latin American values as deliberate strategies for fostering inclusion, mediating between teams, and navigating diverse workplace norms. However, these advantages were accompanied by costs, including linguistic barriers, being subject to stereotyping, and feelings of otherness. This study contributes to the field by providing phenomenologically grounded insights into Latin American professionals in Poland, an underexplored group in a Central and Eastern European context, and by demonstrating the value of cultural identity mapping as an elicitation tool for uncovering complex identity negotiations of bi- and multicultural individuals. The article calls for more dynamic approaches to multiculturalism, grounded in qualitative inquiry and close attention to lived experiences.
This qualitative study explores the factors that guide the management of religious accommodation in call centers serving overseas clients. Conducted in 2012 and updated in 2024, it features Tunisia-based call centers engaged in business with Western clients. The study finds that these firms' religious strategies are primarily guided by whether their interactions with Western clients require heightened levels of trust due to the exchange of sensitive information. We also find that some companies that impose religion-accommodation policies on employees do so as part of a dual-accommodation strategy directed both to meeting employees' cultural expectations and to meeting the cultural expectations of Western clients. The study enriches the cross-cultural and religion management literature by revealing the key factors that guide religious policies in a cross-cultural setting.
This study examines the extent to which Ubuntu ideology may provide a relational mechanism for mitigating inter-organisational managerial conflict and supporting value creation in supply chain operations. Drawing on survey data from 394 managers and supply chain operations supervisors, the study uses PLS-SEM to test four interrelated hypotheses. The findings show that Ubuntu-oriented conflict management is positively associated with cooperative behaviour and value creation. The results also indicate that cooperative behaviour and value creation are associated with lower levels of inter-organisational conflict. In addition, perceptions of Ubuntu ideology are negatively related to inter-organisational conflict. Taken together, the findings suggest that Ubuntu offers a culturally grounded relational lens through which cooperation, value creation and conflict reduction across organisational boundaries may be better understood.
Leadership studies have long been dominated by Western paradigms, often overlooking the diverse cultural, political, and socio-historical contexts that define leadership in Africa. Scholars have increasingly acknowledged the need to decolonise leadership studies, advocating for a more representative and inclusive approach that integrates African perspectives. Decolonisation in this context refers not only to addressing historical biases but also to creating frameworks that are rooted in African realities, traditions, and philosophies. This paper asks: to what extent has leadership scholarship moved beyond Western-centric frameworks to meaningfully integrate African perspectives? To address this question, 72 English-language, peer-reviewed articles on African leadership published between 2012 and 2022 were reviewed. The analysis reveals a growing, albeit uneven, engagement with African leadership paradigms, the enduring impact of colonialism, and the importance of integrating indigenous knowledge and philosophies such as Ubuntu into conceptualisations of leadership. Conceptual advances have consistently outpaced institutional and developmental change, and the field's reliance on a small number of indigenous frameworks risks reproducing the reductive tendencies it seeks to displace. The study's restriction to English-language publications also means that leadership perspectives from Francophone and Arabic-speaking Africa, including North Africa and the Maghreb, remain largely absent from the analysis. These findings contribute to ongoing scholarly debates on the decolonisation of leadership knowledge and offer an evaluative assessment of how far that effort has progressed. They also carry implications for cross-cultural management scholarship, which can only offer a fuller account of how leadership operates across cultural contexts by engaging African perspectives as independent sources of leadership knowledge.
The most unequal societies in the world are in the Global South - many of these are former colonies where legacy hegemonic systems define socio-economic inclusion. The least equal of these is South Africa, where low trust and incompatible cultural logics inform a persistent labour-leadership disconnect. South Africa exhibits cultural crossvergence: leadership elites adopt Western normative and behavioural schemas, while relational and belief-based indigenous cultural orientations remain salient in blue-collar labour classes. These divergent positions align with historical power asymmetries and contribute to this disconnect. Despite growing attention to culture in organisational research, dominant frameworks overlook how structural inequality, colonial legacies, and spiritual beliefs shape inclusion. This review addresses this theoretical gap with the Divergent Ecocultural Effects conceptual framework, linking overdetermined ecocultural positioning and asymmetrical power effects to cultural legitimacy and organisational cohesion. We theorise a generative mechanism in which individuals' access to dominant organisational schemas is mediated by cultural orientation, socioeconomic position, and ecocultural change imperatives. Our work advances theory by repositioning culture as a dynamic, power-embedded construct in postcolonial contexts. We contribute to critical cross-cultural management theory by offering a power-conscious lens that moves beyond national culture and values-based frameworks to explain trust, legitimacy, and inclusion in organisations nested in socio-economically stratified Global South societies.
The construction sector is an essential part of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) economy and contributes significantly to the gross domestic product. The sector has experienced remarkable growth in complex construction projects that involve diverse multicultural contractors, technical diversity, regulatory oversight and integration across multiple systems. Consequently, this study examined how project governance and cultural intelligence (CQ) influence the successful delivery of complex construction projects. The study was guided by the following question: What are the key variables for project governance and CQ that can be used to enhance the successful delivery of complex construction projects in the UAE? A total of 404 respondents were included in the study. The study employed non-probability and snowball sampling strategies, and the data analysis consisted of descriptive statistics. Validity and reliability were established by evaluating the plausibility of existing knowledge regarding the relationship between project governance and CQ, and their impact on the successful delivery of complex construction projects in multicultural settings. This research contributes to the existing literature on cross-cultural management in the complex construction project delivery. First, it develops and tests a construction-specific CQ-team-performance framework, showing that CQ predicts how well cross-cultural management works and how well projects perform in multicultural complex construction teams. Second, the study delineates essential boundary conditions by demonstrating that the impacts of CQ are dependent on project governance attributes, including the intensity of cultural diversity and the procurement pathway.
Engaging leadership is a managerial style that focuses on satisfying four basic psychological needs of followers (autonomy, relatedness, competence, and meaningfulness) and has been shown to be positively related to followers' engagement, commitment, and performance. Although the Engaging Leadership Scale has demonstrated sound psychometric properties in several national contexts (e.g., the Netherlands, Belgium, Indonesia, and Russia), evidence from culturally distinct and under-researched contexts remains limited. To advance cross-cultural leadership research, the present study examines the cultural generalizability of engaging leadership by testing the psychometric properties of the Engaging Leadership Scale in Romania, a post-communist, high power distance context. In Study 1 (N = 1295 employees), the scale had an appropriate internal consistency and the findings supported the factorial structure and the measurement invariance (configural, metric, and scalar invariance) of the scale across gender and generations. In Study 2 (N = 803 employees), the construct validity of the scale was supported by the positive relationship between perceived engaging leadership and followers' work engagement. Overall, the findings provide evidence for the cross-cultural applicability of engaging leadership. The implications for cross-cultural leadership theory and international leadership research are discussed.
As emerging markets attract growing numbers of multinational firms, competition for skilled talent has intensified amid persistent shortages, with demand far exceeding supply. Yet, despite the strategic importance of attracting and retaining this talent, limited research has examined what motivates highly skilled professionals in emerging economies such as Vietnam. Drawing on 42 semi-structured interviews with young Vietnamese talent employed in Western companies operating in Vietnam, this study examines talent motivations through the combined lenses of motivational and cross-cultural theories. Our findings reveal a notable cultural paradox among Vietnamese talent. While Vietnam is commonly portrayed as a tradition-oriented and collectivist society, the new generation of talent is primarily driven by intrinsic individualistic motivations that emphasize self-development, autonomy, and career achievement. By contrast, extrinsic motivations reflect a more complex configuration in which traditional cultural orientations are blended with modern expectations, valuing both social relationships and participation in decision-making. This coexistence points to the emergence of a distinct talent subculture within Vietnamese society, shaped by the country's ongoing economic and cultural transformation. By highlighting the complex interplay between intrinsic individualistic motivations and nuanced extrinsic factors, this study challenges rigid bipolar models in cross-cultural research and offers new insights into talent retention in emerging contexts.
To address calls for multiparadigmatic approaches to critical cross-cultural management (CCM) research, this paper engages with ontological, epistemological, and methodological possibilities from transnational migration studies (TMS). Guided by a mobility lens and adding to existing critical approaches within CCM scholarship that have critiqued Western epistemologies and static cultural models for representation, this paper aims to expand critically-oriented paradigms for research related to 'people on the move' and migration experiences. As the ontological premise of TMS, the mobility lens focuses on movement, including experiences of inequality, dispossession, and displacement, and its implications for the formation of social groups that defy categorization and reification through references to national borders. By expanding upon three key concepts from TMS, transnational social fields, scalar notions of being and belonging, and historical conjunctures, the paper contributes to ongoing conversations in critical CCM about ethics and representation beyond methodological nationalism, rethinking the unit of analysis through encounters, and extending the 'field' in fieldwork. Building on these potential contributions, the paper engages in three epistemic reflections on 'ethics on the move', representation and surveillance, and interdisciplinarity as emergent considerations for future critical qualitative research on people, mobility, culture, and global work in the broader field of management and organization studies (MOS).
This study examines the evolving leadership identity among a new generation of Russian business leaders, challenging the temporal stability of static cross-cultural frameworks. Based on qualitative interviews with 30 MBA graduates in Moscow, Russia, the findings propose a model of hybrid leadership characterized by confidence, result-driven inspiration, relational care and ingenious concept of otvetstvennost (ownership and moral responsibility). The research reveals a significant shift in leadership perceptions, where emerging leaders favor participative, humane-oriented, and transformational leadership styles over traditional authoritarian approaches. However, this transition is marked by a sociolinguistic tension: a persistent reluctance to internalize the term "leader" despite demonstrating leadership behaviors. This generational shift is theorized as an identity struggle between entrenched national prototypes and global managerial exemplars. The implications suggest that leadership development in transitional economies functions as an "identity laboratory," requiring programs that reconcile local cultural nuances with evolving global standards.
Informal networks are essential for professional and social integration in South Korea's collectivist context, yet their exclusivity often creates significant barriers for self-initiated expatriates (SIEs). This study explores how SIEs navigate South Korea's hierarchical and culturally embedded informal networks, such as Yongo (regional ties) and Yonjul (educational connections). Drawing on qualitative interviews with 30 self-initiated expatriates, it identifies strategies for accessing these networks and addresses gaps in understanding adaptation within the South Korean cultural context. The findings extend Social Capital Theory by highlighting the dual role of bonding and bridging capital-with bonding capital reinforcing exclusivity, and bridging capital enabling access through alternative pathways. The study also refines Berry's Acculturation Framework by introducing a behavioral typology-Survivors, Politically Savvy Actors, Isolated Individuals, and Cultural Assimilators-which captures how relational and cultural dynamics shape adaptation. These insights demonstrate how SIEs combine strategic behaviors with cultural sensitivity to overcome exclusion and foster belonging in South Korea. The study offers actionable implications for expatriates, organizations, and policymakers seeking to support integration in Korea's exclusive, high-context social environment. By bridging theoretical frameworks with practical strategies, this research advances our understanding of self-initiated expatriate adaptation within South Korea's informal network systems.
