Intercultural Interactions in the Multicultural Workplace: Traditional and Positive Organizational Scholarship

Abstract

The contemporary world is full of intercultural clashes, conflicts, and tensions. The systematic growth of global competition, the rapid development of multinational corporations (MNCs), the explosion of new communications media, and the access by global masses to mass culture are pushing human societies toward intercultural convergence. Differences, however, refuse to disappear. Differences are pushing human societies toward divergence—suffice to mention the growing religious, ethnic, social, and economic discrepancies and inequalities. We are far from Fukuyama’s vision of the “end of history” and much closer to Huntington’s image of “the clash of cultures.” The research and reflection about intercultural interactions may be the answer to the growing problems of a “multicultural” society.