A worldview approach to the difficulty of confidence on a global team

Abstract

There is continued need in academic and practitioner domains for improved engagement across cultures. To address the need for intercultural approaches at the intersection of theory and practice with a focus on interculturality as action rather than research knowledge, we describe a worldview approach to intercultural difficulties experienced in a real-world global management team. A part of deep culture, worldview is often left undefined, conflated with similar terms, or expressed as a typology in intercultural literature. We therefore propose a novel worldview conceptualization, fusing seminal, interdisciplinary literature, and resulting in three composite universals – morality, agency, and positionality (MAP). We collected anonymous, self-reported narratives from members of a multinational project and applied MAP as a heuristic to deductively guide interpretation. Research questions focused on identifying intercultural difficulties, revealing tacit worldview assumptions about reality to gain an emic view of intercultural Others, and exploring the connection between both. Four overarching findings about the methodological use of MAP resulted. Five intercultural difficulties were identified; we focused specifically on the “difficulty” of confidence. Worldview MAP has theoretical and methodological implications for intercultural scholarship and informs practical application in organizations seeking innovative approaches to intercultural competence and conflict mitigation and resolution.