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For managers, intercultural effectiveness requires forging close working relationships with people from different cultural backgrounds (Black, Mendenhall, & Oddou, 1991). Recent research with executives has found that higher cultural metacognition is associated with affective closeness and creative collaboration in intercultural relationships (Chua, Morris, & Mor, & 2012). However, little is known about the social cognitive mechanisms that facilitate the performance of individuals who score high on cultural metacognition. We propose that one important question for cross-cultural research and training is identifying which metacognitive strategies enable successful intercultural collaborations. We suggest that one such strategy is "cultural perspective taking"-considering how another's cultural background shapes their behavior in a given context. We hypothesized that cultural perspective taking facilitates intercultural coordination and cooperation, and that a manipulation that boosts cultural perspective taking would be especially beneficial for individuals who score low in dispositional cultural metacognition. We found support for the above hypotheses in five studies using both quasi-field and experimental approaches. We discuss the implications of these findings for literatures on expatriate managers, cross-cultural training, cultural intelligence, and intercultural negotiations.

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Political theorists of globalization have argued that foreign inflows to a society can give rise to collective‐identity closure—social movements aiming to narrow the in‐group, and exclude minorities. In this research we investigate whether exposure to the mixing of a foreign culture with one's heritage culture can evoke need for closure, a motive that engenders ethnocentric social judgments. On the basis of a proposed identity threat mechanism, we tested the hypothesis that exposure to situations mixing foreign and heritage cultures would evoke need for closure for individuals with low foreign identification but not those with high foreign identification. An experiment with Hong Kong Chinese students varied linguistic and visual cues of Western and Chinese culture and found, as predicted, that exposure to mixed Western/Chinese conditions elevated need for closure for those low in Western identification but not those high in Western identification.

We examine the multiculturalism–creativity link from the perspective of diversifying experiences research. Multicultural experiences can be construed as diversifying experiences—highly unusual and unexpected events or situations (e.g., unusual educational experiences, early life adversity) that push individuals outside the frameworks of their ordinary everyday lives, forcing them to embrace new and uncommon ideas. Our review identifies a range of diversifying experiences (e.g., multicultural exposure, unexpected adversity, violations of expectations) that have been found to influence creativity. We introduce the Diversifying Experience Model (DEM), where we argue for a curvilinear relationship between diversifying experiences and creativity, whereby creativity improves as a result of moderate (but not low or high) levels of diversifying experiences. We also propose adaptive personal resources as the key moderator, and threat and challenge appraisals as the key mediators of the diversifying experience–creativity relation. When adaptive resources are high, moderate diversifying experiences are appraised primarily as a challenge, facilitating creativity, whereas when adaptive resources are low, moderate diversifying experiences are appraised primarily as a threat, derailing creativity. This broad and parsimonious theoretical framework can help clarify and expand research on when and why various diversifying experiences (including multicultural experiences) facilitate creativity.