Laurence Romani

This chapter equips the reader with concepts and theories for the resolution of intercultural situations. It presents three ways culture has been understood and studied in research and demonstrates their usefulness for solving global situations. The first is the positivist approach that compares and measures the impact of cultural dimensions on behaviour. The second is the interpretivist approach that provides explanation of how individuals see their cultural world and consequently act in it. The third is the critical perspective that approaches cultural differences foremost as the expression of power differences. The chapter shows, with the help of a case study that is progressively analyzed, that when used complementarily, these three approaches provide a rich and insightful conceptual framework for the analysis and efficient resolution of culture-related management situations.

Allt fler företag i Sverige försöker öka mångfalden bland sina anställda utifrån en övertygelse om att grupper bestående av olika personer är mer kreativa och innovativa och utifrån värderingar som är baserade på allas lika värde. Till exempel skriver en detaljhandelskoncern på sin hemsida: "Mångfald är nödvändigt för att vi ska kunna skapa inkluderande och innovativa företag. Mångfald och integration är en av de viktigaste samhälls- och hållbarhetsfrågorna just nu." Detta kapitel handlar om det mångfalsarbete som bedrivs i svenska företag och förändringspotentialen i detta arbete. 

In today’s increasingly global world, the management of differences is becoming a part of the activities of managers as well as global leaders. We argue that, despite leaders’ best intentions, the consideration of these differences and the way in which they are handled may be unethical. We advance that inclusive leadership could be a valid framework to address cultural diversity differences in an ethical way. This chapter is concerned with the concept and practice of inclusive leadership and its possible contribution to the management of cultural diversity in organizations. We first present the ethical challenges that organizations face when leading cultural differences. By examining the fundaments of what is commonly called “the business case” for diversity, we underline its ethical limitations. We then underscore the ethical problems that are linked to the ways in which cultural differences are frequently seen and defined. Adopting a relational perspective on leadership, we introduce the concept of inclusive leadership. Building upon the existing literature on diversity and cross-cultural management, we proceed to propose a three-step model for inclusive leadership on an interpersonal level. Our ambition is to increase the awareness for global leaders of the ethical components of leading cultural diversity.

Broadly speaking, critical cross-cultural management (CCM) research is a stream of studies that examines the various ways in which power permeates intercultural situations and corporate efforts to manage them. Underpinning it is the view that the ‘cross-cultural’and its management are not neutral phenomena, but rather imbued with power relations. These power relations are seen to be rooted in both society and materiality, for example in societal ideas about given countries or ethnic groups, and in material conditions such as the weight of commercial relationships between countries.

Diversity management (DM), inclusive leadership, and workforce diversity are well-established management practices in today’s corporate world. They are part of a trend that addresses the management of traditional workforce ‘differences’ in terms of, for example, gender, ethnicity, race, and national culture. With the emergence of this trend, the term global diversity management has been adopted to describe the efforts, in particular by multinational organizations, to manage workforce differences. Global diversity management thus builds on a combination of DM and cross-cultural management (CCM), which are both multi-faceted fields inspired by various research traditions. CCM and DM are thus often, in practice, considered together when adopting strategies to manage employees’ differences. Doing so assumes that both fields are compatible. This chapter aims to problematize the existing conflation of CCM and DM studies under the label of, for example, global diversity management, in order to develop conditions under which dialogue and synergies between the two can be extended. Outlining how the fields differ, we identify the opportunities created at their intersection. This chapter first briefly presents the existing framework of global diversity management, which sits at the intersection of CCM and DM. Then, we outline a case to illustrate the tensions and contradictions emerging at this intersection. We explain these tensions by adopting a meta-theoretical level of analysis and showing that there are four major research traditions (using Burrell and Morgan’s 1979 paradigmatic grid) represented in both CCM and DM.

Two important streams of cross-cultural management (CCM) studies define culture in terms of either values or meanings. These are the positivist and interpretivist streams (see Sackmann, in this volume, as well as GertsenXX1Zølner, in this volume). In contrast to these, this chapter is positioned in the ‘critical CCM’stream (see Romani et al., Chapter 3 in this volume), inspired by the critical management studies initially formulated by Alvesson and Willmott (1992). This critical perspective questions the essentialist and naturalist view of cultural differences (building on values or meanings). We argue that these views are neither ‘natural’nor ‘essential’–that is, they do not represent the central aspect to be investigated in intercultural interactions. For example, in a corporate situation in which a manager of Israeli origin is leading a team of salespeople positioned in Iran, there might be additional aspects beyond national value differences that shape their intercultural interactions; even more so if the manager is a conservative Jewish person of Russian origin.