Abstract
This chapter explores the benefits of leveraging business strategies, which incorporate third culture-building approaches throughout the entire organizational ecosystem, with a deep dive into people management and leadership aspects. Third-culture kids who grew up to be working adults were influenced by their parental, organizational, and personal intercultural dynamics, fostering a strong personal identity enriched by their diverse lived experiences. Post-pandemic, there seems to be a high-demand trend for attracting talent with global capabilities and cross-cultural multidisciplinary leadership perspectives to conduct business across borders with greater ease and minimal training. Leaders and managers who can leverage mindsets associated with third culture perspectives are increasingly developing a competitive edge within multicultural organizations. Concepts in this chapter will deepen awareness, understanding, and appreciation for third culture mindsets, guided by mixed-methods doctoral dissertation research findings.
TopIntroduction
The pandemic severely affected the future of work as this unprecedented catastrophe dismantled the traditional workplace and thrusted individuals and enterprises into virtual—and often very isolated—hybrid environments (Gallup, 2023). Nevertheless, consummate leaders were able to rapidly shift to new settings with crisis challenges perceived as an opportunity to learn from the experience towards shaping a better future for work and life. Leaders with positive mindsets, including those with third culture experiential mindsets (Waal & Born, 2020), were able to promptly adapt to this disruptive situation and perceived sudden experiences from change challenges as opportunities to grow themselves, their teams, communities, and organizations.
Third culture people organically exhibit critical foundations consistent with a more robust set of multicultural personality traits and intercultural competencies. Their intercultural life experiences positively impacted their resilience capacity for change by developing strong communication and relational competencies such as social flexibility/initiative, tolerance for ambiguity, managing uncertainty, cultural empathy, and global ethical responsibility (Pollock et al., 2010; Waal & Born, 2020). These third culture individuals demonstrate increased levels of cultural intelligence, which indicates an intercultural competence with greater capacity for adaptability within highly diverse multicultural organizations (Fang et al., 2018; Matveev, 2017; Schlaegel et al., 2017). Hence, cross-cultural enabled leaders are more likely to be skewed towards a leadership approach for leading self and others that is positive in nature which is aligned to open-mindedness (Bremer, 2018; Moore & Barker, 2012).
Vάzquez-de-Prίncipe (2021) conducted a doctoral dissertation mixed-methods study which investigated integrative facets of workplace culture change leadership, human intelligences, change management, and sustainable organizational transformations within various sectors, including nonprofit, private, public, and government. The multidisciplinary research approach incorporated psychosynthesis and superconscious principles, which inspired a new framework for Work-Life Predictive Dynamics and Holistic Leadership Intelligence models (Vάzquez-de-Prίncipe, 2021) for reimagining the future of work/life constructs. The pandemic and civil unrest fractured the sense of civility and belongingness throughout all aspects of society, fostering a work-life unbalanced calamity evident from the high levels of stress-related burnout, mental health issues, quiet quitting/firing, and the great resignation/reshuffle challenges (Wigert & Agrawal, 2022). Henceforth, the research insights on culture highlighted work-life dynamics impacted by the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) (Diefenbach & Deelmann, 2016) state of the world, which incorporated leadership, authenticity, grit, resilience, social-emotional skills, growth intelligence, and spiritual intelligence concepts (Vάzquez-de-Prίncipe, 2021).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Organizational Spirituality: The cultural identity resulting from business values, practices, and dialogue constituted by workplace and individual spirituality, guided by the leaders and other members’ well-being, which influences knowledge-sharing enablement and generates alignments in values-system to foster enterprise-wide positive work-life dynamics.
Workplace Spirituality: The organizational climate that demonstrates concern of employees’ well-being as it pertains to matters of the human spirit and soul in a balanced manner as opposed to only being focused on the bottom-line financial, material, and physical business matters.
Third Culture Person: Individuals influenced by their culturally diverse environments who exhibit a sense of inclusive open-mindedness towards accepting others’ differences and demonstrate critical leadership excellence foundations consistent with a stronger set of multicultural personality traits and intercultural competencies.
Organizational Culture Mapping: The cultural mapping exercise is process for diagnosing organizational cultures through a measured design approach to identify areas in need of improvements prompting strategic change-guided action steps towards positively transforming environments by garnering engagements to establish organizational and individual commitments.
Spiritual Leadership Intelligence: The ultimate intellectual ability to lead self and influence others from a place of spiritual well-being, towards garnering a sense of meaning and purpose in work-life through integrative experiences for building connectedness with whole-self, humanity, nature, music, art, literature, and higher power.
Change Leadership Psychology: The practical integration of positivity, neurodiversity, and spirituality with psychological dimensions and domains to inherently serve as passionate authentic catalysts for transformational change leadership for driving sustainable organizational excellence.
Holistic Catalyzing Culture: The ability of organization to withstand, adapt, and thrive in the face of shocks, requires external and internal perspectives to assess the financial/operational strengths, weaknesses, threats/risks, and rebalancing opportunities to facilitate strategic resilience, while fostering positive leaders within human-centric workplace.