Becoming a resourceful intercultural communicator: Intercultural communication competence and identity negotiation in global work interactions

In today's global corporations, organizational members daily collaborate across entire continents and interact with colleagues and associates of diverse cultures and work practices. Multinational teams operate within the core of this organizational infrastructure and are pivotal to the success of their organization as they possess multiple perspectives and can generate more alternatives and solutions inspiring innovation and greater productivity. Although diversity offers a wide range of perspectives, it also presents challenges to team cohesiveness, especially within multinational teams with varying cultural identities and contrasting work practices. Members are faced with the challenging task of negotiating their cultural identities in order to engage in more effective intercultural interactions and synergies with global team members. This social phenomenon offered a site of research that observed the everyday discourse and interactions between global organizational actors and sought to answer the question, "What is it really like to work globally?" This qualitative, interpretive study was conducted at a global R&D healthcare organization expanding operations into Asia and Latin America. Study participants were selected from a series of workshops developed to raise awareness of the tenets of intercultural competence and help members comprehend how self-reflection of their own cultural identity as well as an appreciation of the `other' can improve global interactions and help members make sense of their global organizational life. An ethnographic, phenomenological study guided by Interpretive Phenomenological Analyses (IPA) (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009) observed and analyzed personal narratives and lived experiences of members exposed to the challenges faced working in a global environment. An explanation and interpretation of findings are guided by Ting-Toomey's (1993) identity negotiation theory of Communication Resourcefulness and framed within a social constructionist view of organizational sensemaking.