Research Roundup: December 2021

Why Cultural Diversity Is Not Enough

If companies want to gain competitive advantage from building a multicultural workforce, they cannot view multiculturalism as an end in itself. Rather, they must take deliberate steps to draw on employees’ diverse backgrounds and perspectives.

This is the message of a recent study by Hae-Jung Hong, an assistant professor at NEOMA Business School based in France, and Dana Minbaeva, a professor of strategic and global human resource management at Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. Their paper, “Multiculturals as Strategic Human Capital Resources in Multinational Enterprises,” was recently published in the Journal of International Business Studies.

Over two years, Hong and Minbaeva conducted an ethnographic study in two multinational enterprises—a consumer goods company and an auditing and consulting company. The pair focused specifically on how organizations can gain competitive advantage by employing individuals with multicultural knowledge, skills, and attributes.

Companies are investing more in recruiting and hiring multicultural employees, but in many instances, their investments do not pay off in competitive advantage, Hong and Minbaeva argue. “Practitioners within these companies know little about how to manage [these employees] more effectively,” says Minbaeva.

For companies to gain this advantage, they must have several factors in place, say Hong and Minbaeva. These include multicultural team leadership, diverse teams, and a strong global mindset. The researchers also emphasize the need for flexible language policies. “Our respondents did not express a preference for English,” says Hong. “Instead, they stressed the importance of explicitly supporting multilingualism as a fundamental part of daily operations.”

Finally, Hong and Minbaeva advise multinational companies to adopt differentiated human resources strategies that accommodate diverse personnel. This step contrasts with many companies’ current HR policies, which often emphasize equal treatment for all employees. Such equality-driven policies, however, do not take into consideration the practices or conventions of individual employees’ religions and cultures.

The multicultural workforce is a fertile area “for future collaborative research between academia and practice,” says Hong. She adds that such research “could yield interesting insights into the global mindset as a strategic capability relevant for managing a multicultural workforce.” 

Identifying the Needs of Students With Disabilities

The Disability Accommodations and Support Services (DASS) office at California State University Channel Islands (CSUCI) recently embarked on a research initiative to discover how virtual learning during the pandemic affected students with disabilities. The results of the project, called “Exploring Service Allocations and Student Success for CI Students with Disabilities Before, During, and After Virtual Instruction Due to COVID-19,” will be used to help CSUCI better serve all of its students.

The analysis was especially important to CSUCI given current enrollment trends, explains Michelle Resnick, DASS director and leader of the project. Among the 7,000 students enrolled at CSUCI, more students than ever before—approximately 6 percent to 8 percent—now identify as having a disability.

Initial analysis of the data reveals that students with disabilities face challenges similar to those of other students in the transition to virtual learning, says Resnick. These challenges are largely related to internet connectivity, job loss, and the transition to fully online learning.

But while the survey identified universal challenges, it also highlighted the fact that not all courses were easily accessible to students with different physical, emotional, and mental abilities. “We had to rethink note-taking, testing, captioning. And we had to address all the things that happen to students when they’re sitting in front of a computer for hours and hours and hours,” Resnick says.

“Society views disability through a remedial model—that something’s broken or something needs to be fixed. We want to remove the stigma.” —Michelle Resnick, CSUCI

As one measure, DASS set up its Survival Skills Online Boot Camp, a series of videos that cover techniques to help students learn online more effectively. Although the boot camp was aimed at students with disabilities, DASS discovered that even students without disabilities used these resources, says Resnick. 

To help students feel less isolated, DASS formed Diverse Dolphins, a group where students with disabilities and their allies without disabilities could socialize and learn from each other. “Right now, it’s a hybrid group, [with some students] meeting in person and some virtually,” says Resnick.

DASS also launched the Delta Alpha Pi Honor Society for students with disabilities. The group meets twice a month to hear speakers, socialize, and attend workshops. 

Resnick hopes that the school can use the results of its research project to help reframe what it means to have a disability.

“What we’re trying to do is change the culture,” she says. “Society views disability through a remedial model—that something’s broken or something needs to be fixed. We’re saying this is a social justice and equity issue. It’s the same whether someone has a disability or has brown eyes or brown hair or is a person of color. It’s just a point of identity. We want to remove the stigma.”

What Drives or Stifles Digital Transformation?

If a company’s leaders want to achieve digital transformation, they should pay close attention to the entrepreneurial mindset of their employees, according to the authors of a study published in the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Business leaders then should deploy employees in ways that best suit their entrepreneurial strengths.

The paper’s co-authors include Paavo Ritala, professor of strategy and accounting at the LUT School of Business and Management in Lappeenranta, Finland; Abayomi Baiyere, associate professor in the department of digitalization at Copenhagen Business School in Denmark; Mathew Hughes, professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at Loughborough University’s School of Business and Economics in the United Kingdom; and Sascha Kraus, professor of management at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in Italy.

The co-authors surveyed 166 employees at a mid-sized manufacturing company in Northern Europe to discover each employee’s “individual-level entrepreneurial orientation” (IEO). IEO is made up of three attributes: proactiveness, risk-taking, and innovativeness. The survey also asked employees about their relational capital within the organization—the level to which they rely on their personal networks within the company.

The researchers found that employees who demonstrate high levels of proactiveness and risk-taking contribute the most to boosting a company’s digital transformation. By contrast, employees who are more oriented toward innovativeness often did not contribute as much to a company’s digital transformation—and they could even have a negative effect if they relied too heavily on strong networks within the firm.

The study indicates that “a given digital strategy project might require proactive employees during the implementation phase, while innovative-oriented employees could be better suited to the creative development roles in such projects,” Ritala explains in a summary of the research on Copenhagen Business School’s website.

This research could have implications for how well businesses harness digital strategies to address complex problems such as combating climate change and creating a circular economy, the co-authors write. “Our findings suggest that managers should consider tailoring operational initiatives to employee capabilities that best align with the organization’s strategic intent and relational structure.”

Teaching Creativity Through Object-Based Learning

Teaching business students to think more creatively is the focus of a paper published in a special edition of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. “Collaborating on a creative solution to teach creativity to business students” was co-authored by Dewa Wardak and Abdul Razeed, both lecturers at the University of Sydney Business School, and Jane Thogersen and Eve Guerry, academic engagement curators at the university’s newly opened Chau Chak Wing Museum.

The paper focuses on the use of object-based learning (OBL) in Analytic and Creative Mindsets, a course in the University of Sydney Business School’s Master of Commerce program. In one session of the course, students explore historical artifacts, photographs, and artworks from the museum in an exercise designed to spark their curiosity and creativity.

In this exercise, students work with objects as diverse as an anti-gravity suit from the 1940s and a 19th-century helmet from the island nation of Kiribati made from the skin of a pufferfish. Other objects include a giant beetle specimen, a bronze thumb from an ancient Greek statue, and a poster from the 1980s promoting anti-nuclear policies.

In a course at the University of Sydney, students work with unusual artifacts, such as a 19th-century helmet made from the skin of a pufferfish, as a way to spark their creativity.

Students work in groups to create narratives that link four seemingly disconnected objects. The goal, say the authors, is for students to become adept at devising creative solutions to business problems.

Each object “acted as a disruptor for students, initially placing them in unfamiliar territory and removing the standard support structures that they find in a traditional accounting classroom,” the co-authors explain. OBL, they add, can help students cultivate skills they will need to be effective team members and problem solvers. Such skills include “empathy, communication, observation, analysis, deductive reasoning, problem solving, and creative and critical thinking.”

“Creativity is increasingly recognized as an important aspect of business education,” says Wardak in an article on the school’s website. “More and more companies require staff to look at existing problems in different ways, to find novel alternatives. As a hands-on component, this exercise enhanced students’ knowledge retention and was fun to boot.”

Taking a ‘More Ethical’ Approach to HR

In a new paper, two researchers argue that it’s time for companies to take a more employee-centric approach to human resources. Their paper, “A theory of HR co-creation,” was published in the December 2021 issue of the Human Resource Management Review.

The researchers include Rebecca Hewett, an assistant professor at the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, and Amanda Shantz, a professor and director of the MBA program at the University of St. Gallen’s Executive School of Management, Technology and Law in Switzerland.

Hewett and Shantz define HR co-creation as “a continuous process in which HR and stakeholders create value through collaborative efforts to problem-solve and innovate in the design and use of HR practices to help them to better satisfy stakeholders’ needs.” Unfortunately, traditional HR policies often do not allow an organization’s stakeholders to contribute to the evolution of these practices.

But HR policies have value only if employees use them. The co-authors point to the example of offering flexible working hours. Rather than create flex-time policies that apply to employees across the board, companies will reap more benefits—in the form of greater worker happiness and productivity—if they allow employees have a say in the hours they work.

To embrace HR co-creation, say the authors, organizations should set management goals, but stay flexible in how people achieve those goals. Next, they should ask stakeholders—including employees, managers, family members, customers, and suppliers—what they need.

Hewett and Shantz say that HR professionals will need to play three roles in their organizations. They will need to be knowledge brokers who ask employees and managers what practices work best and how those practices can be adapted to meet different needs; design experts who create practices that center on user experiences; and relationship managers who build connections, cultivate trust across the organization, and encourage people to share their insights and experiences.

HR co-creation is “inherently democratic and ethical,” Hewett and Shantz write. “HR practices only create value if they satisfy users’ needs,” they add. “This goal can be best achieved when stakeholders are active agents in creating value.”