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Cross-Cultural Management of Creativity

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Introduction

The rapidly changing global business environment demands organisations to work with a

cross-cultural workforce, maintain effective cross-cultural communication and nurture

innovation, creativity and change in this culturally diverse work environment. While addressing

innovation and creativity in an organisation, cross-cultural people can bring their cultural

characters to nurture creativity. This essay is going to delve into the details of the ways to

manage a culturally diverse human resource and nurture creativity and innovation in it.  

Hofstede’s Theory

According to Hofstede, there are 4 dimensions of any culture in the world which are the

Power Distance Index (PDI), Individualism Index (IDV), Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI)

and Masculinity-Femininity Index (MFI). These dimensions determine a culture’s point of view

towards innovation and creativity. A nation’s culture is found to influence its level of creativity.

The countries with higher scores of IDV have been found to be better in creativity and

innovation (Rinne, Steel & Fairweather 2013). 

While expanding into a new country, a business organisation should always look into

ways to include people from local cultural identities in the workforce. There are certain benefits

of this approach including wide knowledge of the market, better access to the local markets and

inclusion of diverse skills and knowledge. However, there are certain problems associated with

the cross-cultural workforce, which may include ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism can be defined as

the process of evaluating other cultures based on one’s own cultural standards. This gives rise to

cultural superiority, which may lead to cultural discrimination and stereotyping. Instead of taking

advantage of a culturally diverse workforce, more often than not, the superiors from the home
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country impose their cultural identity onto the cross-cultural workforce, resulting in poor human

resource management. 

Cross-cultural leadership and creativity

Managing creativity in a culturally diverse workforce in a foreign country is not an easy

task. The role of leadership style and motivation is very crucial in these types of scenarios.

Leaders need to create an organisational climate with certain aspects including healthy conflicts,

debates, trust, dynamism, freedom, challenging and calculated risk-taking to nurture new ideas

and support creativity. The leaders in a bicultural organisation should make teams, which should

be inclusive of culturally diverse group members. 

The cross-cultural leaders should always monitor the ethnocentrism of the workforces,

which should always be prevented in order to minimise unhealthy conflicts in the teams (Young,

Haffejee & Corsun 2017). Interculturalism should be nurtured in these culturally diverse work

environments. There should be the presence of a third culture identity in cross-cultural

organisations. Individuals with third cultural identities always tend to acknowledge other cultural

identities with respect and they have the strength to maintain positive communications with

culturally diverse people. 

According to the Social Identity Theory (SIT), a person with a different cultural identity

mostly wants to mute his differences to be a part of a group (Scheepers & Ellemers 2019). There

are two types of behaviours noticed in a group. One is Interpersonal behaviour and the other is

intergroup behaviour. When a group member behaves completely according to his own

individual characteristics and relationships, it can be called complete interpersonal behaviour. On

the other hand, when a person braves solely depending on his social category membership, it can
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be called a complete intergroup behaviour. SIT states that group members’ behaviours are

determined by a continuum between these two types of behaviour, which gives rise to a third

identity, which can be named organisational identity. 

A business organisation, which is trying to include culturally diverse people in their

workforce by expanding into different territories and cultural environments, should always

encourage cultural convergence by increasing interaction between the culturally diverse

population in their workforce (French 2015). Effective cultural convergence leads to cultural

hybridisation, resulting in a third culture in an organisation, supporting SIT. It is essential to

encourage the practices of cultural hybridity in the cross-cultural management of culturally

diverse workforces.

Cultural diversity and Creativity

According to Paulus, van der Zee and Kenworthy (2016), culturally diverse teams are

more creative than culturally homogenous teams. Teams with people from different cultural

backgrounds, ethnicity, geographic location and nationality should give rise to broad ranges of

ideas. They also commented that, although multicultural teams can provide process gains in the

ways of increased creativity, they can also lead to process losses due to excessive conflicts

because of cultural diversity. It is imperative to maintain and manage the degree of conflict in

multicultural teams to effectively nurture creativity.  

Glăveanu (2020) suggested that creative work in groups and individuals can be triggered

by cultural differences. Diverse cultural backgrounds give rise to different perspectives, based on

which, culturally diverse people take decisions. However, in a group environment, these

differences in perspectives force the group members to think creatively to obtain solutions. There
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can be individual differences based on personality profiles, demographic differences and social

differences. However, cognitive differences matter the most when creativity is considered.

Cognitive differences can be formed on the basis of knowledge, expertise, points of view and

culture. Cross-cultural leaders should always strive to achieve higher levels of creativity by

taking advantage of different perspectives emerging in a group from cultural diversity.  

Intercultural Competency

In a cross-cultural organisational environment, pressure should be put on intercultural

competency to build cultural sensitivity and intercultural understanding. Intercultural

competence can be characterised by an increased tolerance of different cultures, openness,

acquiring ample knowledge about different cultures of the workspace and willingness to interact

with diverse cultures and perspectives. Cross-cultural leaders should always have high degrees of

intercultural competency in order to include different cultures in their decision-making

processes. 

Conclusion

It is very important that culturally diverse people are included in the decision-making

processes, which will provide them with work motivation and job satisfaction. It is also found in

research studies that there is a reciprocal relationship between job satisfaction and creativity.

To conclude, it can be said that, when a creative company expands into another country

with a culturally diverse workforce, interculturality should be encouraged to include culturally

different people in the workplace. It is evident that cultural diversity encourages creativity at

group levels as well as at individual levels. However, proper management of intercultural and
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cross-cultural workforce conflicts is required to obtain high levels of creativity from culturally

diverse workforces.   
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References

Fitzpatrick, F., 2019. Understanding intercultural interaction: An analysis of key concepts.

Emerald Group Publishing, pp.298-300

French, R., 2015. Cross-cultural management in work organisations. 3rd ed. London: CIPD,

pp.31-39.

Glăveanu, V.P., 2020. A sociocultural theory of creativity: Bridging the social, the material, and

the psychological. Review of General Psychology, 24(4), pp.335-354.

Paulus, P.B., van der Zee, K.I. and Kenworthy, J., 2016. Cultural diversity and team creativity.

In The Palgrave handbook of creativity and culture research (pp. 57-76). Palgrave Macmillan,

London.

Rinne, T., Steel, G.D. and Fairweather, J., 2013. The role of Hofstede's individualism in

national-level creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 25(1), pp.129-136.

Scheepers, D. and Ellemers, N., 2019. Social identity theory. In Social psychology in action (pp.

129-143). Springer, Cham.

Young, C.A., Haffejee, B. and Corsun, D.L., 2017. The relationship between ethnocentrism and

cultural intelligence. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 58, pp.31-41.