The Impact of Knowledge Dynamics on Multicultural Leadership and the Mediating Role of Cultural Intelligence

Abstract

Business internationalization and globalization naturally led to the need to manage across cultures and develop new competencies for leaders. One of these competencies is cultural intelligence (CQ) that is actually a meta-competence because it incorporates rational, emotional, spiritual, and social intelligence. Cultural intelligence expresses the capacity of a leader to understand different cultures and the behavioral types generated by them, and to make decisions able to satisfy multicultural requirements, avoiding intercultural conflicts due especially to different cultural and religious values and principles. Different cultures are characterized by different knowledge dynamics which influence the process of decision making and multicultural leadership. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of knowledge dynamics on multicultural leadership, in multicultural business environments, and what is the role of cultural intelligence in this process. Based on the critical literature review we identified the main constructs and connections we have to explore through an investigation based on questionnaires and a statistical analysis using PLS-SEM method. The findings confirmed our initial hypotheses.