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The purpose of this paper is to examine challenges faced by senior construction managers in managing cross‐cultural complexity and uncertainty. The rationale was to identify the key strategies that are considered essential for managing cross‐cultural complexity and uncertainty.

Interviews with 20 senior construction managers, ten in Kenya and ten in the UK, were recorded, transcribed and entered into the qualitative research software NVivo. Validity and reliability were achieved by first assessing the plausibility in terms of already existing knowledge on some of the cultural issues raised by participants. The findings were presented to the participants through workshops and group discussions.

The emerging key issues suggested that project leaders need to learn how to control their own characteristics and to use them selectively. An effective multicultural construction project team should focus on team output and attributes that characterise a multicultural team as a social entity.

Findings indicate that the role of construction project managers has significantly changed over the past two decades. In order to deal with cross‐cultural uncertainty, project leaders must have superior multicultural and interpersonal skills when managing global multicultural heavy engineering projects.

The research shows that leaders of global construction project teams need a good understanding of their culture, environment and the value of their individual contributions.

This chapter examines the complexity of global leaders themselves. As global leadership research has begun to move beyond a limiting overemphasis on skills and competencies, we merge one focus on the deep structure of leader cognition with a focus on cultural identity that has matured largely independently. In so doing, we seek to push the field toward answering the broader question of what makes a global leader sufficiently complex to handle the vast complexities of the role. We place the construct of self-concept complexity as central to the performance of global leaders in ways ranging from organizational performance to social and community responsibility. By advancing our understanding of the role of self-concept complexity in driving global leadership outcomes, this research seeks to spur further theoretical development and practical application toward a deeper comprehension of the complexity of truly global leaders.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a new trend that has swept the world of business by storm. With globalization proceeding unabated and CSR acquiring global interest and resonance, examining how companies can make adaptations to their CSR in an international context becomes a timely and important issue.

Drawing on institutional theory, this study aims to identify three types of host country institutional complexity that accompany the internationalization process, namely, cultural, regulatory and economic, hence necessitating nuanced CSR adaptations in context and as illustrated in this paper requiring different tailoring and adaptation of CSR programs and interventions between developed and developing countries.

The authors propose a series of research propositions for exploration toward broadening and deepening the understanding of the above institutional complexities and the necessity of CSR tailoring and adaptation to accompany the internationalization process.

The paper is one of the first to highlight the necessity of CSR tailoring in the context of the internationalization process while considering host country institutional complexity highlighting nuanced differences between developed and developing country landscapes and implications for how multinational corporations should approach CSR in these differentiated environments.

Inherent in the meaning of global mindset is the dilemma of an appropriate level of analysis at which we define, measure, and research this construct. This chapter addresses the individual level of analysis using social cognition, which explains how the development process of global mindset helps individuals make sense of unfamiliar stimuli, broaden their cognitive capacities, adjust their behavior accordingly, and have a positive influence on others. Our recently developed core construct of positive psychological capital, or PsyCap (Luthans, Youssef, & Avolio, 2007), and the overarching process of authentic leadership development (Avolio & Luthans, 2006) are used to explicate the theoretical social cognitive framework. The “influence on others” implies a leadership process, and that is why we address the role that global mindset may have in the authentic leadership development process (Avolio & Luthans, 2006).

It is commonly believed that the complexities of different languages, cultures, histories, time zones, locations, governments, financial and legal systems contribute to the difficulty of leading global change. And yet, there is surprisingly little research at the intersection of global change and global leadership to guide practitioners. To fill this crucial gap, we provide a helpful framework for global leadership practitioners and scholars that emerged from a qualitative study of success factors in leading effective global change initiatives. We employed a comparative case study methodology to examine strategies and processes used by leaders of successful corporate and NGO global change projects. After comparing multiple cases of successful and unsuccessful global change initiatives in four organizations, we concluded that effective global change requires leaders to pay attention to 14 success factors categorized into three key design imperatives: (1) participatory process, (2) representative leadership, and (3) nested implementation. Participatory process consists of these success factors: (1) establish a clear vision, (2) ensure a collaborative start, (3) invite to the table as equals, (4) seek ideas from outside headquarters, (5) recognize and celebrate others, and (6) build systems for interdependence and accountability. Representative leadership includes: (7) create local leadership, (8) enable knowledgeable leadership, (9) empower willing leadership, and (10) develop bridge people. Nested implementation is composed of: (11) leverage formal communication channels, (12) attend to individual needs via interpersonal communication, (13) set global standards with local flexibility, and (14) test for regional credibility. We discuss these factors in light of existing literature and identify the implications and new horizons for global leadership theory and practice with respect to leading global change.

The purpose of this paper is to address four questions: what are the drawbacks of an over reliance on the objectivist tradition in culture in international business (CIB) scholarship? Is a shift from mono-paradigmatic to multi-paradigmatic cultural research justified? What explains scholars’ hesitation in engaging in multi-paradigmatic studies? What arguments can we offer to convince them otherwise?

Informed by the critical perspective, this paper encourages a shift from mono-paradigmatic to multi-paradigmatic cultural studies. Guided by an emancipatory interest, and treating the field of culture studies as a complex system, this paper offers an integrative complexity (IC) based argument in favor of multi-paradigmatic studies. It argues that multi-paradigmatic studies allow scholars to employ higher IC than mono-paradigmatic studies, resulting in more innovative research outputs.

While mono-paradigmatic studies can achieve either predictability of output or in-depth understanding of cultural phenomena, multi-paradigmatic studies are capable of attaining both. The authors illustrate this through the example of a recent multi-paradigmatic study.

This paper does not offer insights for operationalizing multi-paradigmatic research, nor does it address factors other than IC that may impede scholars from engaging in such studies.

Shifting from mono-paradigmatic to multi-paradigmatic studies will enable scholars to address questions hitherto left unaddressed in CIB literature, facilitate a better understanding of new organizational forms, and redress the power disequilibrium between different paradigmatic schools. Implications are also offered for the training of cultural researchers in business schools.

This paper is the first of its kind to relate IC to merits of multi-paradigmatic cultural studies.

Based on attributional complexity (AC) theory, the authors empirically examine the impact of biculturalism on cross-cultural adjustment and the degree to which people make isomorphic attributions, critical for cross-cultural leadership effectiveness.

Using questionnaire surveys, the authors first validate measures in a validation sample and then empirically test the model in a second sample, using structural equation modeling.

The authors’ findings reveal an empirical connection between biculturalism and AC on the one hand, while also showing support for the relationship between biculturalism and attributional knowledge. Findings also demonstrate that biculturalism is related to attributional accuracy in cross-cultural contexts via an attributional mechanism, as suggested by AC theory.

First, AC theory emerges as one with excellent prospects for explaining intercultural work in multicultural settings. Biculturalism's links to AC and attributional knowledge are critical for extensions to cross-cultural leadership effectiveness, and international knowledge transfer, interesting and high potential research avenues for the discipline.

The authors’ findings carry a host of managerial implications. AC training can provide all international assignees with the necessary foundational skills and learning abilities to successfully interact in the host country setting with local nationals. This study also suggests that managers on international assignments should focus their efforts on acquiring attributional knowledge because it can provide a solid boost to their understanding of the local culture.

One’s understanding of biculturals and their cross-cultural management competencies is very limited. The authors provide empirical support for the hypotheses, hitherto unexamined in extant literature.

Megaproject's construction is essential for the development and economic growth of any country, especially in the developing world. In Kuwait, megaprojects are facing many restrictions that discourage their execution causing a significant delay in bidding, design, construction and operation phases with the execution quality being affected. The objective of this study is to develop a complexity measurement model using analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for megaprojects in Kuwait, with a focus on the New Kuwait University multi-billion campus Shadadiyah (College of Social Science, Sharia and Law (CSSL)) as a case study.

The study applies a hybrid fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) method to compare the results with those obtained using the conventional AHP method. This can facilitate the project management activities during the different stages of construction. Data were collected based on the results of a two-round Delphi questionnaire completed by seniors and experts of the selected project.

It was found that project modeling methodology was responsible for complexity. It was grouped under several categories that include technological, goal, organizational, environmental and cultural complexities. The study compares complexity degrees assessed by AHP and FAHP methods. “Technological Complexity” scores highest in both methods, with FAHP reaching 7.46. “Goal Complexity” follows closely behind, with FAHP. “Cultural Complexity” ranks third, differing between methods, while “Organizational” and “Environmental Complexity” consistently score lower, with FAHP values slightly higher. These results show varying complexity levels across dimensions. Assessing and understanding such complexities were essential toward the completion of such megaprojects.

The contribution of this study is on providing the empirical evidential knowledge for the priority over construction complexities in a developing country (Kuwait) in the Middle East.