Cultural intelligence and COVID-induced virtual teams: Towards a conceptual framework for cross-cultural management studies

Abstract

This article proposes a creative approach to cultural intelligence, as an individual’s capability to function effectively under the condition of cultural diversity. Virtual team collaboration, as stimulated by the COVID-19 pandemic, constitutes a novel, culturally diverse context. We explore how cultural intelligence may shed light onto the requirements of post-COVID virtual and hybrid team collaboration. The contribution of this article to cross-cultural management studies is thus conceptual: by using the concept of cultural intelligence creatively and beyond its classic application, we exemplify a way in which cross-cultural management studies remain relevant, in an increasingly virtual world of work wherein people travel less to other countries, wherein collaboration takes place online and remotely, and wherein national cultural boundaries intersect with other cultural diversity factors.

COVID-induced virtual teams: A phenomenon-based framework and methodological advice for studying novel events

“…To identify post-COVID hybrid team "high potentials," it might be helpful to learn from those who proved to be highly resilient during the crisis in order to better understand which individual processes enabled employees to cope with crisis demands more or less successfully. For example, as related to inner processes, Mahadevan and Steinmann (2023) suggest that meta-cognitive intelligence, namely the ability to reflect upon past experiences and use them for preparing for future unexpected events, might be a determining factor regarding which individuals show resilience in the post-COVID teamwork environment the best.…”

“…Secondly, the phenomenon-based approach also enables researchers to move concepts from one phenomenon to another in order to probe their applicability. For example, as Mahadevan and Steinmann (2023) have shown, a traditionally “cross-cultural” concept such as “cultural intelligence” might also be applicable to the novel inner -cultural context of COVID-induced virtual teams, thus providing managers and organizations with novel insights into the leadership skills required for managing post-COVID teams successfully. Thus, phenomenon-based research bears the potential of cross-fertilization of disciplines and application areas.…”

“…However, the new types of virtual teams were COVID-induced. Unlike previous types of virtual teams, they had neither emerged from corporate necessity or strategic considerations nor technological considerations and know-how or employees' motivation and abilities (Mahadevan & Steinmann, 2023). We thus understood them as a novel phenomenon requiring conceptualization and used them as an example for offering methodological advice on how to conceptualize novel phenomena.…”

Investigating otherness, not difference: Should saming and othering be the focus of the discipline? Implications for a contemporary cross-cultural management studies

“…Brannen (2020) thus finds people’s identities to be ‘n-cultural’ and argues that this understanding is the basis and required focus point of a contemporary CCM studies (also see Mahadevan, 2023). Furthermore, many individuals at work experience a cultural diversity that is mediated by information and communications technology (Mahadevan and Steinmann, 2023), for example when collaborating in work-from-home or work-from-anywhere settings. Many people have cross-cultural encounters at work without any physical movement, and scholars therefore investigate the cross-cultural management implications of virtual assignments (Cascio and Collings, 2022; Wicht and Holtbrügge, 2023) and virtual expatriation (Nguyen Ngoc and Andresen, 2022), and propose novel frames such as the idea of a virtual global mobility (Selmer et al, 2021).…”