Leadership emergence in multicultural teams: The power of global characteristics

Building on theories of person-environment fit and on the pattern approach, we hypothesized that emergent leaders in multicultural teams score higher than non-leaders in terms of the three global characteristics, of cultural intelligence, global identity and openness to cultural diversity. We tested this hypothesis on a sample of 317 MBA students who worked on a four-week joint project in virtual multicultural teams. Employing logistic regression analysis, the results revealed that individuals who scored high on the above three global characteristics were significantly more likely to emerge as leaders than were other team members.