Nike Cultural Intelligence Case Study

1485 Words6 Pages

Nike and Cultural Intelligence

Globalization has resulted in a growing prevalence of international organizations, rising numbers of employees participating in international assignments and an increase in multicultural teams operating in home countries. Accordingly, an ability to interact with people of different cultures has become especially important to organizational wellbeing generally, and to international organizations in particular such as Nike (Dalton & Daily, 2000).
International business issues -- which have been identified as among the most important critical strategic issues facing organizations (Hoffman & Gopinath, 1994) - continue to be a point of focus for organizations as they join the global market (Tsui, Nifadkar, & Ou, …show more content…

There are now over 100 published studies that have investigated the influence of cultural diversity on organizational behavior, leading Tsui et al (2007) to describe the 21st century as the “century of international management research”. More teams in organizations are becoming multicultural (Adler, 2002) and global teams have grown to be a source of competitive advantage (Kirkman, Gibson, & Shapiro, 2001). As a result of growing cultural diversity in the workforce, and its accompanying challenges (e.g. conflict in culturally diverse teams(Jehn, Northcraft, & Neale, 1999), within-team cultural diversity continues to be of considerable interest to scholars and practitioners …show more content…

Individuals from different backgrounds often fail to identify with people who are different from them, resulting in strained or challenged social interactions. A review of demography and diversity in organizations (Williams & O'Reilly, 1998) reveals how self-categorization and similarity/attraction theory influence group processes, which in turn impact group performance. Moderators of this relationship have been studied, including common goals and collectivist culture, both of which positively influence the relationship between team process and team outcome. The present study examined team cultural intelligence (measured through individual team member’s cultural intelligence aggregated to team level cultural intelligence) for its positive influence on team processes. Specifically, CQ is likely to enable individuals to better understand and appreciate people of different cultures, thereby resulting in better team processes and superior team