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Many, if not most, academic researchers interested in international business have worked on teams made up of individuals from many different countries. Ironically, there has been little research attempting to explain the unique dynamic of such teams and their advantages and disadvantages. The goal of this paper is to develop a model of international academic research teams with an aim towards understanding how they can be managed more effectively. We highlight some of the important variables that affect team functioning and discuss their relationships with both antecedents and outcomes. Specific propositions are developed and their implications are discussed.

In this essay, we seek to understand how international business schools contribute to the development of effective global leaders. To do so, we start by examining the practical needs and challenges faced by multicultural teams operating in diverse global environments. Next, we compare and contrast three models of global leadership skills development used at three international institutions in Poland, Mexico, and Canada. We analyze each approach using Brake’s (1997) global leadership triad and Oddou and Mendenhall’s (2018) transformational axes model. We then discuss the future of global leadership education and the role business schools should play in the development of appropriate skills.

This paper outlines the authors’ experience of working with international cross‐cultural teams, and is an attempt to address the question about how international organizations can give rise to a sustainable capability in which generations of teams build on each other’s experience. The paper outlines some of the behavioural dynamics, both constructive and destructive that seem to occur in international teams, and focuses on ways of working through the destructive dynamics. The paper suggests that sustainable learning can happen when organizations and teams engage with the “cultural whirlpool” that their internal diversity creates; when they maintain ongoing cross‐cultural conversations which bring cultural differences and understandings alive; and where they engage with the strategic moments that are afforded by their emotional and relational dynamics.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the antecedents of project creativity in international marketing teams. The proposed framework includes both proximal (characteristics that impact the everyday functioning of the team) and distal (characteristics associated with the team's organizations that are relatively remote to the everyday functioning of the team) factors as antecedents of project creativity. Specifically, the authors investigate the influence of three proximal factors, namely, collaboration with foreign counterparts, autonomy, and international experience as well as two distal factors, namely, organizational encouragement and innovative organizational culture.

Data were collected from 156 executives from publicly traded firms in the manufacturing sector in South Korea and tested using hierarchical regression.

Collaboration with foreign counterparts and autonomy exert direct positive influence on project creativity. International experience exerts a curvilinear relationship such that low and high levels of international experience positively influence project creativity, whereas moderate international experience negatively influences project creativity. In addition, whereas the relationship between organizational encouragement and project creativity was supported, the relationship between innovative culture and project creativity was not.

Despite the importance afforded to international marketing teams and creativity in marketing research and practice, little attention has focussed on project creativity in international marketing teams. This study represents an initial effort toward filling the void and identifying certain proximal and distal factors as relevant antecedents of project creativity in international marketing teams. In addition, deviating from extant studies on creativity, this study highlights a curvilinear relationship between international experience and creativity.

This study aims to examine the relationship between knowledge management and career development in an era characterized by high levels of youth unemployment and a demand for specialized skills. Despite the increasing transition to a knowledge-based economy, there is a significant gap between young people’s skills and career readiness, necessitating an in-depth analysis of the role of knowledge management at the individual, organizational and national levels.

The authors conducted a qualitative study using the theory-context-characteristics-methodology approach based on a systematic literature review. The authors created an ecological framework for reflecting on knowledge management and career development, arguing for a multidisciplinary approach that invites collaboration across sectors to generate innovative and reliable solutions.

This study presents a comprehensive review of the existing literature and trends, noting the need for more focus on the interplay between knowledge management and career development. It emphasizes the need for businesses to promote the acquisition, storage, diffusion and application of knowledge and its circulation and exchange to create international business human capital.

The findings may help multinational corporations develop managerial training programs and recruitment strategies, given the demand for advanced knowledge-based skills in the modern workspace. The study also discusses the influences of education, experience and job skills on business managers’ performance, guiding the future recruitment of talents.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this review is among the first to assess the triadic relationship between knowledge management, career development and the global unemployment crisis. The proposed multidisciplinary approach seeks to break down existing silos, thus fostering a more comprehensive understanding of how to address these ongoing global concerns.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the action learning experience of business students in cross‐cultural teams in the role of international business information gatekeepers for small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SME) focused on international business opportunities.

Action research is applied by combining a questionnaire survey, analysis of mid‐term and final project reports, reflective team discussions and feedback from representatives of enterprises.

The cross‐cultural alignment of teamwork habits – offering leads for business contacts when presenting broader innovative ideas to SMEs, demonstrating the competence of the team when specifying the preliminary task and sharing knowledge with other teams – are essential challenges for project teams. Reflections of the teamwork process reveal the impact of some of the dimensions of cultural diversity introduced by Hofstede and Trompenaars.

Student teams and enterprises did not represent all key Estonian export destinations. Southern European countries and China are overrepresented in comparison with northern European countries that are culturally closer to Estonia. Further research could link action research, follow‐up surveys of SMEs involved in the projects and comparisons of SME samples from different business sectors.

Entrepreneurs in Baltic countries and in other new EU member states can benefit from gatekeepers that help entrepreneurs understand more advanced markets and to develop cross‐border networking with partners in other regions of Europe. A virtual community that can match students from different cultures, before and after their Erasmus exchange, in a co‐operation network for a cross‐border market study and search for contacts within enterprises is needed to facilitate more advanced cross‐border networking in the entrepreneurship‐education process.

The paper highlights factors supporting and inhibiting cross‐cultural synergies between action learning and e‐learning, cross‐border student exchange and knowledge sharing between SMEs and international student teams.

In this study, micro-foundations of strategy as the theoretical framework to study the effect of managers’ individual characteristics on multinational team performance are adopted. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to study managers’ multilingual communication abilities and multicultural background, and their role in, respectively, effectively reconfiguring team human assets and sensing cognitively distant opportunities and threats.

This study uses national football teams competing in national and international competitions and their coaches’ characteristics as the data set to test the theory. Using random coefficient modeling and ordinary least square regression, this paper analyzes two samples of 222 and 79 teams and found that both these characteristics contribute to team performance; however, their effects differ depending on the team environment.

Multicultural managers contribute positively to team performance only when the team is operating in a highly diverse environment, their effect is not statistically significant in homogeneous environments. In less diverse environments, it is the multilingual manager who can improve team performance through more efficient communication and greater effects of leadership on the team.

Managers’ characteristics such as their multicultural background and multilingual capabilities affect team performance. In particular, these effects come into play in highly diverse and international settings. Micro-foundation literature is advised to focus on the internationalization and multicultural backgrounds of managers as a precursor for organizational international performance.

Today, in the sports arena, the status of a sports team brand is vital. The purpose of this paper is to describe and explain how a team can become an international global brand. Following a conceptual approach, it articulates a model for a team's brand internationalisation and proposes four strategies relevant to the sports arena - Brand Reputation; Brand Affinity; Brand Challenger; and Brand Conquistador. It illustrates this internationalisation process via three case studies: Football Club Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain and Olympique de Marseille.

How do you efficiently design a global yet local user experience for Web sites? Arguably, the user-centered design approach has been one of the best methods in designing a successful user experience for Web services in the initial market, but why isn’t this process applied to international markets? This chapter makes a case for applying a user-centered design process to the international expansion of Web sites and discusses issues impacting the creation of a successful user experience for local audiences. Although this chapter primarily focuses on designing large scale Web services, many of the principles can be applied to any sites that undergo internationalization.

This paper aims to explore the key factors affecting knowledge transfer within cross-cultural teams in international construction projects from three levels: individual factors, team factors and knowledge characteristics. It also provides a comprehensive framework to examine how trust, cultural distance, team identification, knowledge tacitness and complexity and members' transfer willingness impact knowledge transfer effectiveness within cross-cultural teams.

A conceptual model and 16 hypotheses were put forward through the literature review and pilot investigation. This study used structural equation modeling to examine how factors affect the effectiveness of knowledge transfer within cross-cultural teams based on the questionnaire data of samples from Chinese international construction projects.

The findings show that affect-based trust and team identification positively affect the willingness to contribute knowledge. Conversely, knowledge tacitness, knowledge complexity and cultural distance negatively influence contribute willingness. Moreover, affect-based trust, cognition-based trust and team identity positively affect receive willingness, while cultural distance negatively impacts receive willingness. Additionally, affect-based and cognition-based trust, knowledge tacitness and complexity affect transfer effectiveness through the full mediation of transfer willingness, while cultural distance and team identity affect transfer effectiveness through the partial mediation of transfer willingness.

On the one hand, this research provides a holistic framework for factors affecting knowledge transfer within cross-cultural teams from three levels: individual factors, team factors and knowledge characteristics. On the other hand, the paper gives other researchers in international project management the enlightenment of focusing on members' cultural structure and the cross-cultural training of the team.

This study offers the direction for cross-cultural team managers to formulate helpful approaches for knowledge transfer and assist corporate leaders in taking integral control measures to enhance knowledge transfer effectiveness within the team.

This study provides other researchers with a comprehensive understanding of the key factors affecting knowledge transfer within cross-cultural teams in international construction projects and insight for further research on project management and knowledge management.