ABSTRACT
A critical issue for global talent management is developing culturally agile leaders who can effectively lead in different countries and lead people from different cultures. Global leaders share cross-cultural competencies related to self-management, relationship management and business management. These competencies are developed through an aptitude × treatment interaction whereby leaders’ individual factors, such as openness and learning agility, interact with cross-cultural training and cross-cultural experiences to produce a different developmental gain in cross-cultural competencies. Cross-cultural experiences, including international assignments, short-term international assignments and global project teamwork, can be crafted to make them more developmentally rich. To do so, organizations should attend to crafting cross-cultural experiential opportunities with certain characteristics (e.g., novelty, social learning). This chapter posits that from the perspective of global talent management, leaders with certain individual characteristics should be given the opportunities for developmentally rich cross-cultural experiences. Collectively, these practices would accelerate the development of effective global leaders in multinational organizations.
