Getting the most out of living abroad: Biculturalism and integrative complexity as key drivers of creative and professional success.

Abstract

The current research investigated how patterns of home and host cultural identification can explain which individuals who have lived abroad achieve the greatest creative and professional success. We hypothesized that individuals who identified with both their home and host cultures (i.e., biculturals) would show enhanced creativity and professional success compared with individuals who identified with only a single culture (i.e., assimilated and separated individuals). Further, we expected that these effects would be driven by biculturals' greater levels of integrative complexity, an information processing capacity that involves considering and combining multiple perspectives. Two studies demonstrated that biculturals exhibited more fluency, flexibility, and novelty on a creative uses task (Study 1) and produced more innovations at work (Study 2) than did assimilated or separated individuals. Study 3 extended these findings to general professional outcomes: Bicultural professionals achieved higher promotion rates and more positive reputations compared with assimilated or separated individuals. Importantly, in all 3 studies, integrative complexity mediated the relationship between home/host identification and performance. Overall, the current results demonstrate who is most likely to achieve professional and creative success following experiences abroad and why.

Not Just for Stereotyping Anymore

“…Indeed, the act of producing something creative occurs when people move beyond preexisting associations and instead generate novel ideas, flexibly frame the same problem in multiple ways, or recombine existing ideas to make novel connections (Guilford, 1950;Mednick, 1962;Sassenberg & Moskowitz, 2005;Schooler & Melcher, 1995;Ward, Smith, & Finke, 1999). These creative processes occur more readily when people take into account and combine multiple categories and representations (e.g., Simonton, 1988;Tadmor, Galinsky, & Maddux, 2012) rather than rely on what they believe are fixed, essential characteristics of category membership (Ward, 1994(Ward, , 1995. Thus, we expected that an essentialist mind-set would undermine general creative potential and that this deleterious effect would be due to essentialists' closed-minded tendency to avoid divergent views.…”

Multi-competence and personality

“…Interestingly, creativity was found to be enhanced 'only when participants recalled a functional multicultural learning experience and only when participants had previously lived abroad' (p.731). Tadmor, Galinsky and Maddux (2012) took this line of investigation one step further, by looking beyond the effect of mere exposure to new cultures on creativity and professional success. The authors wondered why all individuals who had lived abroad for several years did not perform at the same rate.…”

Criatividade e multiculturalismo: revisão de literatura

“…Diversos benefícios já foram relacionados ao multiculturalismo, entre eles: adaptabilidade, liderança e capacidade de resolução de problemas (Friedman & Liu, 2009); sucesso profi ssional (Tadmor, Galinsky, & Maddux, 2012); ampliação de redes sociais (Mok, Morris, Benet-Martínez, & Karakitapoglu-Aygun, 2007); e criatividade (Crisp & Turner, 2011;Leung & Chiu, 2010;Saad, Damian, Benet-Martínez, Moons, & Robins, 2012). A criatividade, entendida como um processo por meio do qual algo útil e original é criado (Amabile, 1996), tem sido amplamente investigada nessa relação.…”

“…São quatro as estratégias apontadas: assimilação, separação, marginalização e integração. Tadmor, Galinsky et al (2012) verifi caram que estudantes universitários que adotaram estratégia aculturativa de integração tinham escores superiores em medidas de criatividade em comparação a indivíduos que adotaram estratégia aculturativa de separação ou assimilação. Dessa forma, o modelo de identifi cação multicultural baseado nas estratégias de aculturação explicaria como o multiculturalismo relaciona--se à criatividade.…”