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Graduates of cross-cultural management (CCM) courses should be capable of both tackling international and cross-cultural situations and creating positive value from the diversity inherent in these situations. Such value creation is challenging because these situations are typically complex due to differences in cultural values, traditions, social practices, and institutions, such as legal rules, coupled with variation in, for example, wealth and civil rights among stakeholders. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors argue that a scientific mindfulness approach to teaching CCM can help students identify and leverage positive aspects of differences and thereby contribute to positive change in cross-cultural situations.

Scientific mindfulness combines mindfulness and scientific thinking with the explicit goal to drive positive change in the world.

The authors explain how the action principles of scientific mindfulness enable learners to build positive value from cultural diversity. The authors then describe how to enact these principles in the context of CCM education.

Cosmopolitanism represents a complex, multilevel, multilayer phenomenon manifested in a variety of social spheres, including moral, political, social, and cultural. Yet, despite its prominence in other disciplines, cosmopolitanism has received relatively scant attention in international management research. Furthermore, the understanding of cosmopolitanism as an ever-present social condition in which individuals are embedded lags significantly behind.

In this chapter, we develop a conceptual framework for cosmopolitanism as an individual-level phenomenon situated at the intersection of the moral, political, and sociocultural perspectives. The framework explicates the interrelations between macrolevel dynamics and individual experiences in a globalized world. We conceptualize cosmopolitanism as an individual disposition manifested and enacted through identities, attitudes, and practices. We also highlight the diversity of individuals who can be considered cosmopolitans, including those who may not possess the classic cosmopolitan CV. Finally, the chapter explores the implications of cosmopolitanism for global organizations and global leadership.

We aim to explore whether demographic groups of varying status positions differ in terms of their perception of work group members’ openness to deep-level and surface-level diversity. We also explore the effect that task group conflict and relational group conflict have on perceptions of openness to diversity.

Quantitative analysis of responses from 489 academics in multicultural university departments is applied. A comparison is made of different demographic groups based on age, nationality, and seniority with regard to perceptions of work group members’ openness to diversity. Specifically, we focused on perceptions of the work group’s openness to value dissimilarity (deep-level) and openness to visible dissimilarity (surface-level).

We found that there are indeed differences between demographic groups with regard to perceptions of the work group’s openness to value dissimilarities. No significant differences could be found in relation to openness to visual dissimilarities for any of the demographic sub-samples. We also found that there were differential effects of contextual adverse circumstances in the form of relational group conflict and task group conflict on the perceptions of the two types of work group openness to diversity.

The knowledge that different demographical groups perceive their peers’ openness to diversity differently is an important insight when decisions regarding diversity issues have to be taken.

Few studies have focused on perceptions of diversity. This is an important omission because individuals often act upon their perceptions, rather than on objective reality.

This chapter is about how leaders attempt to move from traditional to shared leadership and why they often cannot. We develop a new theoretical framework to examine whether leaders are willing to shift control from themselves to their followers and thus promote shared leadership in their teams. We argue that control shifts, while necessary for shared leadership, are particularly difficult for leaders to enact. This is because leadership is often closely bound with power and status in the organization, a reality of organizational life that is often overlooked in the quest for new forms of leadership, such as shared leadership. Our contribution lies in examining leaders’ ability to enact shared leadership through the lenses of primary and secondary control, and situating control shift in the context of global leadership including selected cultural dimensions, complexity, and paradoxes.

We conceptualize new ways to qualify what themes should dominate the future international business and management (IB/IM) research agenda by examining three questions: Whom should we ask? What should we ask, and which selection criteria should we apply? What are the contextual forces? Our main findings are the following: (1) wider perspectives from academia and practice would benefit both rigor and relevance; (2) four key forces are climate change, globalization, inequality, and sustainability; and (3) we propose scientific mindfulness as the way forward for generating themes in IB/IM research. Scientific mindfulness is a holistic, cross-disciplinary, and contextual approach, whereby researchers need to make sense of multiple perspectives with the betterment of society as the ultimate criterion.

The purpose of this paper is to present a systemic approach to understanding the challenges facing executive teams in making good decisions and propose a simple framework for addressing these challenges.

Having identified Groupthink as a useful framework for understanding the challenges facing decision‐making groups, the paper reviews research into potential solutions and leverages case studies to propose a new model for tackling the challenges inherent in decision making.

The suggested model incorporates previously proposed process‐ and insight‐based solutions and adds a broader focus on information flow and how decision‐making behaviour is influenced and informed by the context in which it occurs.

The paper emphasises the role of a trusted, expert coach in implementing the proposed solutions and describes how coaches can leverage an understanding of the systemic nature of decision‐making behaviour to improve decision‐making ability in both teams and individuals.

Areas for future research are identified and potential limitations to the model are discussed, in particular the impact of geographical and organisational cultural issues.

The paper questions the predominantly individual‐based approach to tackling the challenges of decision making and highlights additional interpersonal processes that can both cause and be the source of solutions to Groupthink.

The purpose of this paper is to build theory and present a model of the development of conflicts in teams.

The paper develops a conceptual model based on past theory and research.

The model brings a multi-level perspective to the process of intragroup conflict by showing the mechanisms by which an interpersonal, dyadic conflict can spread to other team members over time through a process of conflict contagion.

This study provides a new model for conflict escalation and it sheds light on factors which can either ameliorate or exacerbate the speed and extent of conflict contagion. The repercussions of different degrees of conflict involvement within a team are discussed.

Are there “really” gender differences in leadership? Do beliefs regarding gender differences in leadership differ across cultures? And how do these beliefs influence diversity management? This article aims to demonstrate how different beliefs regarding gender differences and leadership can influence company diversity policies and initiatives.

First, the authors review the research evidence on the relationship between gender and leadership. Then they explore the effects of gender stereotyping. Furthermore, they consider the role of culture on these beliefs. This review serves as the foundation for the discussion of three different perspectives regarding gender and leadership: gender‐blind; gender‐conscious; and perception‐creates‐reality (or believing is seeing).

Adhering to these different paradigms can influence actions taken to managing diversity and human resource policies. Revealing these different paradigms can help companies and managers reassess their diversity practices.

The paper discusses issues that are of interest to all levels of managers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the interrelation between language differences, media choice and social categorization in global virtual teams (GVTs).

An ethnographic field work was conducted in a Finnish multinational corporation (MNC). The study included interviews, observations, and language proficiency assessment of 27 GVT members located in five European countries.

In GVTs, the combination of language proficiency differences and verbal media (e.g. telephone) tends to lead to social categorization, while a similar effect was not found when GVT members chose written media (e.g. e-mail).

The qualitative study only consisted of GVTs from one MNC, and thus the empirical findings might not be generalizable to other MNCs. Therefore, quantitative studies that can add to the robustness of the exploratory findings could be a worthwhile endeavour.

Language training should be provided to GVT members, and virtual policies should be implemented to ensure the use of written media in GVTs characterized by language proficiency differences.

Although it is well established in the literature that language differences are detrimental to co-located team effectiveness no study has explored how the relationship between variation in language proficiency and media choice affects social categorization in GVTs.