When cultures combine: Leveraging intercultural resources in cross-border collaborations

Abstract

Cross-border collaboration inevitably gives rise to intercultural challenges connected with the divergent values, expectations, behaviours and artefacts that the participants in the collaboration bring to its specific work settings. In intercultural management research and practice, these challenges have largely been conceptualized in conflictual or at least frictional terms1. Interculturality has thus been primarily posited as a cost factor, in that it is seen as inhibiting the efficient use of resources such as time, money, and human energy. Consequently, the discipline of intercultural management has for the most part set itself the goal of mitigating the challenges, in the negative sense, of cross-border collaboration, through the application of management strategies that seek to remove or at least reduce the obstacles to the attainment of organizational goals. These strategies typically seek to provide international assignees with knowledge of the immaterial and material elements of the national culture(s) whose members they will be or are already working with, along with a behavioural toolkit of ‘dos and don'ts’ to facilitate this interaction2. Underlying this conceptual and practical framework is an implicit understanding of the nature of culture and cultural identity that can be characterized as internally homogeneous, externally bounded and structurally static. Thus, as Wolf puts it, “we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin of each other like so many hard and round billiard balls”3. Similarly, and in spite of the perceived need to avoid stereotypes, individual cultural identity is conflated with that of the culture as whole. As critics of the so-called cross-national comparison model have pointed out4, however, this conceptual framework is essentialist and reductive, and specifically fails to reflect both the fluid and heterogeneous nature of culture, cultural identity and intercultural interaction5 and the importance of culture-independent contextual factors in international collaboration6. There has thus been a paradigmatic shift in the understanding of the basic terms of intercultural interaction, and this shift has led to a new set of perspectives on intercultural management. In particular, the theoretical elaboration of the possibility of cultures combining, rather than colliding, means that cultural difference has come to be perceived as not only a risk but also a resource that can be leveraged by applying the principles of diversity management7. In this way, the practical challenge of cross-border collaboration can be seen in positive terms, as the task of identifying and exploiting intercultural and contextual complementarities towards the achievement of organizational goals. Indeed, the positive aspect of interculturality can be taken one step further by applying the postcolonial concept of cultural hybridity8, which envisages the emergence of a new, synergistic culture that can transform and even transcend the original framework of cross-border interaction9. Interculturality can thus ultimately be seen not only as a resource within an existing collaboration, but also as a source of innovation and thus of positive organizational and personal transformation.