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Psychology, both as science and practice, has been largely developed in one cultural area of the world: Europe and North America. As a result, the discipline is culture-bound, limited in its origins, concepts, and empirical findings to only this small portion of the world. The discipline is also culture-blind, largely ignoring the influence of the role of culture in shaping the development and display of human behaviour. These limitations have resulted in the dominant position of a Western Academic Scientific Psychology (WASP) in relation to other cultural perspectives on human behaviour. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper draws on concepts and strategies in psychology (particularly cross-cultural and intercultural psychology) to propose some remedies to problems arising from the dominant WASP position. For example, of what relevance is such a limited perspective to understanding human activity in other cultures; and how can such a limited understanding serve the purpose of effective intercultural interactions?

The eventual goal is to achieve a global psychology that incorporates concepts and findings from societies and cultures from all parts of the world, one that will permit a valid understanding of people within their cultures, and permit effective intercultural across cultures.

The paper presents some criticisms of the dominant western psychology (WASP), and proposes that the achievement of a more global psychology may be within reach if some concepts and methods now available in psychology from both the dominant western sources and from those working in the rest of the world are used.

For several decades, national culture has been described as having major influence over international business outcomes. Yet national culture has been framed often by vague terms and simplistic scales. The purpose of this paper is to explain why and how the influence of national culture should be reframed.

Review of literature concerned with causation in the behaviour of individuals and groups: anthropology, cognition, psychology, cross-cultural psychology, cultural psychology and cultural geography.

Within every nationality, and across international business, there is dynamic complexity of thought and action among individuals and groups. This derives from differences of genders, age, cultures, personality types and past experiences; the highly complex interactions between them; their commingling with common traits; and the varying influence of contextual factors. This dynamic complexity cannot be addressed by managers through use of vague simplistic conceptualizations of national culture.

As an alternative to vague simplistic conceptualizations, scientific theories, such as resource-based theory, knowledge-based view, contagion theories and social cognition theory, can be referred to in the formulation of multi-resolution simulation models. These models can enable managers to analyze dynamic complex international business scenarios, in terms of situation-specific variables.

The originality of this paper is that it provides a detailed explanation of why vague simplistic conceptualizations of national culture are of limited usefulness to managers of international business. The value of this paper is that it describes a practical alternative: theory-based multi-resolution simulation models.

The high failure rate for expatriate leaders is well documented. One major cause of these failures has been identified as the incongruencies in the perceptions of expatriate leaders and the host members that they manage. This article describes theory and research which suggests that a potential explanation for at least some of these perceptual incongruencies is that they are a result of culturally‐based attributional biases interacting with self‐serving and actor‐observer attributional biases. Although not all of the interactions of these biases result in incongruent perceptions, some interactions appear to be particularly prone to result in incongruent perceptions such as when leaders from highly individualistic and low context cultures interact with members from highly collectivistic and high context cultures. Suggestions for research and interventions designed to reduce incongruent attributions between leaders and members are discussed.

The objective of this paper is to contribute to the accounting education literature by demonstrating that there are significant differences in judgments between Australian and Chinese subjects studying within an Australian university with respect to an important issue in accounting, namely, aggressive financial reporting practices. Aggressive financial reporting is the exercise of professional judgment by accountants (including students preparing for a career in accounting) that fails to depict ‘financial reality’. Our study provides some evidence on the influence of culture (operationalised as one's ethnic background), as well as a personal belief variable, ‘belief in a just world’, on students acceptance of aggressive financial reporting practices. The results have implications for improving accounting education. We suggest that assumptions about uniformity in perceiving Western notions of independence and objectivity embedded in official national and international accounting pronouncements are reflections of ‘culture‐blindness’. Additionally, we suggest that accounting educators may like to ensure that the meanings intended in the official accounting pronouncements which are used as primary teaching material are conveyed to students within specific cultural contexts. Moreover, accounting educators and students need to pay greater attention to the role of various contextual factors in the international accounting harmonisation process.

The purpose of this paper is to gain some insights from a leading scholar of the cross-cultural cognitive social psychology field on how cultural differences are viewed, understood, and dealt with, and thus to contribute to enrich the way cultural differences are framed in cross-cultural management research.

The author conducts a formal, semi-structured interview with Richard Nisbett for a duration of 90 minutes. The author extracts the key message from the interview and re-structures the conversation in a meaningful manner.

From his cognitive social psychology lens, Richard Nisbett views that any cross-cultural contact between different thinking styles is advantageous because differences help address the limitations of one’s own thinking style.

The insights from cross-cultural cognitive social psychology encourage cross-cultural management researchers to further investigate the positive consequences of cultural differences.

Richard Nisbett’s own journey from a young scientist who describes himself as an extreme universalist, to a mature intellectual who understands and appreciates different thinking style, is itself a concrete example of how differences can lead to the positive. The author summarizes three factors that are key to a positive outcome of cultural differences: curiosity and openness to cultural differences; habit of critical thinking; and intense interaction with culturally different others.

In response to the somewhat paradoxical combination of increasing diversity in the global workforce and the resurgence of nationalism in an era of global mobility, the purpose of this paper is to uncover how employees on international assignments respond to exposure to new cultures. Specifically, the paper aims to explicate the underlying psychological mechanisms linking expatriates’ monocultural, multicultural, global and cosmopolitan identity negotiation strategies with their responses toward the host culture by drawing upon exclusionary and integrative reactions theory in cross-cultural psychology.

This conceptual paper draws on the perspective of exclusionary vs integrative reactions toward foreign cultures – a perspective rooted in cross-cultural psychology research – to categorize expatriates’ responses toward the host culture. More specifically, the study elaborates how two primary activators of expatriates’ responses toward the host culture – the salience of home-culture identity and a cultural learning mindset – explain the relationship between cultural identity negotiation strategies and expatriates’ exclusionary and integrative responses, providing specific propositions on how each type of cultural identity negotiation strategy is expected to be associated with expatriates’ exclusionary and integrative responses toward the host culture.

The present study proposes that expatriates’ adoption of a monocultural identity negotiation strategy is positively associated with exclusionary responses toward the host culture and it is negatively associated with integrative responses toward the host culture; expatriates’ adoption of a multicultural identity negotiation strategy is positively associated with both exclusionary responses and integrative responses toward the host culture; expatriates’ adoption of a global identity negotiation strategy is negatively associated with exclusionary responses toward the host culture; and expatriates’ adoption of a cosmopolitan identity negotiation strategy is negatively associated with exclusionary responses, and positively associated with integrative responses toward the host culture. The following metaphors for these different types of cultural identity negotiation strategies are introduced: “ostrich” (monocultural strategy), “frog” (multicultural strategy), “bird” (global strategy) and “lizard” (cosmopolitan strategy).

The proposed dynamic framework of cultural identity negotiation strategies illustrates the sophisticated nature of expatriates’ responses to new cultures. This paper also emphasizes that cross-cultural training tempering expatriates’ exclusionary reactions and encouraging integrative reactions is crucial for more effective expatriation in a multicultural work environment.

This article takes stock of the state of cross‐cultural management in Malaysia. It first focuses on a number of problems that cross‐cultural management faces generally, namely the lack of integrated knowledge and the possibility of subjectivity influencing the research design. Then the article looks at the state of cross‐cultural management research in Malaysia. It concludes that cross‐cultural management in Malaysia is, as yet, a series of “snapshots” with little follow‐up. Lastly, a number of themes for future research in Malaysia are proposed.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview on the state of the field in intercultural dynamics on competition and cooperation at the individual, team, and organizational levels. The authors integrate previous studies from multiple disciplines to articulate the contextual importance of intercultural dynamics. The authors also suggest three overarching themes to expand the field of research on intercultural dynamics.

The authors use an integrative literature review to articulate the importance of intercultural dynamics, provide an introduction to the new contributions in this special issue, and propose new directions for future research.

Intercultural dynamics research has the potential to expand in three overarching areas: constructive controversy, collaborative communication, and global competency and identity at multiple levels.

Intercultural dynamics is still a nascent field emerging from cross-cultural and strategic management. The authors hope the review lays the groundwork for more studies on intercultural dynamics at the interpersonal, team, organizational, and mixed levels of analysis in both theory building and empirical works.

Understanding intercultural dynamics in competition and cooperation can help individuals and managers in multinationals and born global organizations navigate cultural complexity and foster cooperation.

The authors hope the ideas on intercultural dynamics can facilitate collaboration and reduce conflict in intercultural encounters at the individual, organization, and societal levels.

This paper offers an overview on the state of the field and lays groundwork for more systematic inquiries on intercultural dynamics in competition and cooperation.

This paper suggests that motives for engaging in affiliative‐promotive “helping” extra‐role behavior is related to cross‐cultural differences. The cultural dimensions of in‐group collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, performance orientation, and humane orientation, and their differential effect on helping extra‐role behavior in a diverse workforce are examined. Theoretical implications provide guidance for future empirical research in this area, and provide managers with more realistic expectations of employee performance in the workplace.