Biculturalism in Management Leveraging the Benefits of Intrapersonal Diversity

A common refrain in business circles is that the world of business has become more global and international. Yet it is not just that business has become more global—people have become more global. Exposure to other cultures occurs through extended travel, attending universities abroad, and having work assignments in other countries. Even those who have not traveled abroad are exposed to other cultures through TV, movies and classwork. A few places in the world are intensely multicultural, due to either historic intersections of cultures (e.g., Hong Kong or Singapore) or high levels of migration (e.g., New York). In places like the U.S., more people each decade can no longer fit themselves into distinct ethnic categories, thinking of themselves as “mixed” white, black, and Asian (Goldstein & Morning, 2000). Some scholars discuss the development of a new “global” culture of people who are distinctly international (e.g. Anthias, 2001). In effect, cultural “diversity” has moved from being just a process of including different people on work teams or school classrooms to being a process that occurs within an individual (Bunderson & Sutcliffe, 2002; LaFromboise, Coleman, & Gerton, 1993). Recognition of this phenomenon has been advanced in recent years by the work of Hong, Chiu, and others. Hong, Morris, Chiu, and Benet-Martínez (2000), for example, have shown that Chinese in Hong Kong, who are heavily exposed to British as well as Chinese ways of thinking, are essentially bicultural, in the sense that they know and can activate either perspective, depending on the demands of the situation. They have also shown this same dynamic among Asians who have emigrated to the U.S.; these people can act consistent with American norms or Chinese norms, according to situational demands (Hong, Benet-Martínez, Chiu, & Morris, 2003). People can maintain within themselves multiple cultural systems. They add, however, that exposure to other cultures does not automatically produce biculturalism (Benet-Martínez, Leu, Lee, & Morris, 2002). For example, some people who learn about other cultures respond by rejecting one of them. As we will discuss in more detail below, some characteristics of individuals may make it hard for those who simply know a great deal about two cultures to comfortably operate in them both. Therefore, we define biculturalism as more than simply being extensively exposed to two cultures; we define biculturalism as the ability to comfortably understand and use the norms, ways of thinking, and attitudes common within two cultural systems. In the past, many scholars looked at exposures to different cultures as potentially unsettling to the individual (Berger, Berger & Kellner, 1973) and disruptive of social interactions (Pye, 1963; Geertz, 1963). In contrast, we argue that biculturalism can be an asset that is harnessed in international business settings as well as noninternational business settings. Previous concerns about foreign exposure have come mainly from some streams of the “acculturation” literature (Berreman, 1964; Ausubel, 1960; Berry, 1997), where it is assumed that a person moves from one culture into another and has to—in effect—choose between them. Foreign exposure that takes hold of a person will make him or her differ in ways that are not helpful. The most dramatic example is the writings of Joseph Conrad in The Heart of Darkness, or its movie dramatization, Apocalypse Now, where