Collective Intercultural Competence: A New Frontier of Competitive Advantage for International Organizations

Introduction

Research in management, strategy, and international business increasingly highlights the role of people competencies, and cultural values as drivers of competitive advantage (Fuerst, 2025; Teece, 2014). Intercultural competence (IC) at the individual level has long been recognized as crucial for preventing crises, failures, and inefficiencies (Diers-Lawson, 2017; Pyle, 2018; Ivanova-Gongne et al., 2023), but the complexity of work nowadays calls for team competencies: an interculturally competent individual cannot be a hero anymore (Loufrani-Fedida & Missonier, 2015)! Understanding the collective intelligence arising from the cultural intelligence of individual team members through their interactions would allow us to answer the question: what makes a team culturally intelligent (Liao & Thomas, 2025)? Two main reasons explain this shift to Collective Intercultural Competence (CIC): (1) The process of learning about intercultural issues begins in global teams (Bartel-Radic, 2013) through conflict, reflection, and change (Schmidmeier et al., 2020); (2) “Dream teams,” i.e. teams with developed CIC (Liao & Thomas) can achieve goals that individual members could not accomplish alone (Rios-Ballesteros & Fuerst, 2021), as CIC is not simply the aggregate of individual learning within an organization (Liao & Thomas, 2025), but the result of the effective articulation of competences over time (Jerinic Ivic et al., 2024). 

The literature offers two definitions of CIC: (1) “the ability of the group to achieve its objectives effectively through social interaction, intercultural communication, and efficient articulation of cultural differences, resulting from a process of group learning within a multicultural context” (Schmidmeier et al., 2020, p. 158); (2) “an emergent state that involves a shared understanding about what the team knows and how it can and should function with regard to the cultural aspects of its members and its environment” (Liao and Thomas, 2025, p. 427). Jerinic Ivic et al. (2024) confirm that CIC develops through repeated interactions among team members in multicultural settings and through shared learning processes. To sum up, the authors agree that: (1) CIC relies on team learning; (2) CIC is structured at the level of interpersonal interactions; (3) CIC is a dynamic and evolving team-level construct. Nevertheless, due to lack of empirical studies on the topic, a gap remains in the international management literature regarding the components, emergence, development, and measurement of CIC, both in face-to-face interactions and in virtual teamwork (Yousef, 2024).

List of Topic Areas

• Emergence and Development of Collective Intercultural Competence
• Micro–Macro and Multilevel Perspectives on CIC
• CIC as a Strategic Capability
• Collective Intercultural Competence in Virtual and Hybrid Teams
• Conceptualization, Measurement, and Methodological Innovations

Submissions Information

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Key Deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 16/03/2026

Closing date for manuscripts submission: 16/11/2026 

Email for submissions: zorana.jerinic@uvsq.fr