APG5471 - Leadership in intercultural environments - 2018

Global interconnections, transnational flows, and fluid information require today's leaders to be equipped with specific skills hardly acquired through mere international experience. Traditionally, leadership effectiveness is grounded in embracing differences in order to transform challenges triggered by diversity in organisational strengths. More recently, global leadership has been defined as the process of influencing followers from multiple cultures to adopt a shared vision through structures and methods that facilitate positive change in a context characterized by significant levels of global complexity and connectivity.

While intercultural training is nowadays common in business environment, 21st-century graduates as future global leaders must be given opportunities to combine their experience of cultural diversity at home or abroad with targeted education. Addressing current needs of graduates in terms of intercultural competence, this unit focusses on cultural intelligence as the ability to connect with people across similarities, as well as to adapt and adjust across differences. Based on the CQ (Cultural Intelligence) framework, this unit will analyse the four key dimensions (i.e. drive, action, strategy, knowledge) that can be enhanced to perform efficiently and appropriately in intercultural environments.

Upon successful completion of the unit, students will be able to:

1. identify and critique types of leadership in intercultural environment;
2. develop self-awareness and evaluate cultural bias;
3. discuss key capabilities to become more culturally intelligent;
4. estimate and evaluate strategies to enhance intercultural competence;
5. reframe their international experience in light of CQ dimensions.

Within semester assessment: 100%

Minimum total expected workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit is 144 hours per semester typically comprising a mixture of scheduled learning activities and independent study. A unit requires on average three/four hours of scheduled activities per week. Scheduled activities may include a combination of teacher directed learning, peer directed learning and online engagement.

See also Unit timetable information

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