How to manage healthy transcultural organisations

Managers in international companies need to be transculturally competent to realise synergies available from cultural diversity and to communicate and integrate effectively across differences, Prof. Claude-Helene Mayer and Dr. Christian Martin Boness emphasize in their manual „Creating mental health across cultures – Coaching and training for managers“:

• „Dissimilarity openness is required to appreciate cultural differences, including openness to differences contributes to conflict resolution.
• Individuals with a higher emotional intelligence and competence deal with stress in a calmer way and avoid counterproductive activities. Cross-cultural conflict management requires emotional competence to understand the situation.
• Transcultural communication competence is critical for transcultural competence since cultural knowledge, language and verbal and non-verbal communication are highly important to both managing difference and coding and decoding messages.
• Tolerance for ambiguity is a significant cross-cultural competence which supports individuals in managing ambiguous situations without requiring additional (ojective) information.
• Cultural understanding supports trust-building and strengthens communication effectiveness between members of cultural different groups.
• Information processing skills are important with regard to cross-cultural information processing attitudes and cognitive styles. Individuals with a higher cognitive complexity form more extensive and differentiated impressions of others, better represent the behavioural variability of others and seek out unique features of the environment more than individuals with lower  cognitive complexity.
• Conflict management skills impact greatly on the success of individuals on the organisational outcome. Different authors argue that crosscultural competences are particularly important to resolving crosscultural conflicts. Conflict management skills are highly relevant to the success of culturally heterogenous organisations; however, it needs to be considered that conflict management styles also vary across cultures.
• Self-management skills are likely to improve crosscultural interactions. Individuals with high selfmanagement skills are likely to be more flexible in their behaviour and response to demanding situations. They are more capable of sharing information, enhancing performance and negating stereotypic images.“

The manual „Creating mental health across cultures“ aims at developing health-oriented management practices which focus on individual and organisational well-being across cultures. It is a manager´s handbook or vademecum towards a successful and leadership mindset.

Creating mental health across cultures – Coaching and training for managers
Mayer, Claude-Hélène; Boness; Christian Martin
Pabst, 276 pages
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