Cultural distances between home and host countries inspire sojourners to engage in intercultural exchange upon repatriation.

We examine how cultural distance between sojourners' country of origin and their host country influences their engagement in intercultural exchange upon return. One might expect intercultural exchange to be much harder between culturally-distant countries than culturally-close ones, given that the former vary more in norms or expected behaviors from one's home country. Our novel theorizing, however, leads to precisely the opposite expectations. In particular, we hypothesized that cultural distance between the repatriates' home and host countries would be positively associated with being inspired by the host culture. In turn, this heightened inspiration would predict an increased sharing of knowledge about the host culture upon returning home (intercultural exchange). We combined measurement-of-mediation (Study 1) and experimental-causal-chain (Studies 2-3) approaches to test and confirm these hypotheses in three large samples of repatriates. We first examined whether cultural distance predicted greater intercultural exchange via repatriates' heightened inspiration (Study 1). We then tested the individual links in this postulated causal chain. In Study 2, a quasi-experiment, we examined the causal path from cultural distance to inspiration. In Study 3, we experimentally manipulated inspiration to test its causal effect on intercultural exchange. The findings advance theory and application around multicultural experience and intercultural exchange.

Revisiting extraversion and leadership emergence: A social network churn perspective.

One of the classic relationships in personality psychology is that extraversion is associated with emerging as an informal leader. However, recent findings raise questions about the longevity of extraverted individuals as emergent leaders. Here, we adopt a social network churn perspective to study the number of people entering, remaining in, and leaving the leadership networks of individuals over time. We propose that extraverted individuals endure as emergent leaders in networks over time, but experience significant changes in the people being led, including the loss of people who once considered them a leader but now no longer do. In Study 1 (N = 545), extraverted individuals had a larger number of new and remaining people in their leadership networks, but also lost more people, above and beyond differences in initial leadership network size. In Study 2 (N = 764), we replicated and extended these results in an organizational sample while controlling for alternative explanations such as formal rank, network size, self-monitoring, and narcissism. Extraversion predicted the number of people entering, remaining in, and leaving leadership networks over time. Our findings suggest that while extraverted individuals tend to emerge as leaders, they are also more likely to experience greater network churn-they tend to lead different people over time and leave people in their wake who once perceived them a leader but now no longer do. We discuss the challenges posed by this network churn perspective for extraverted emergent leaders and highlight its importance for our understanding of extraversion and emergent leadership. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

"Going out" of the box: Close intercultural friendships and romantic relationships spark creativity, workplace innovation, and entrepreneurship.

The present research investigates whether close intercultural relationships promote creativity, workplace innovation, and entrepreneurship-outcomes vital to individual and organizational success. We triangulate on these questions with multiple methods (longitudinal, experimental, and field studies), diverse population samples (MBA students, employees, and professional repatriates), and both laboratory and real-world measures. Using a longitudinal design over a 10-month MBA program, Study 1 found that intercultural dating predicted improved creative performance on both divergent and convergent thinking tasks. Using an experimental design, Study 2 established the causal connection between intercultural dating and creativity: Among participants who had previously had both intercultural and intracultural dating experiences, those who reflected on an intercultural dating experience displayed higher creativity compared to those who reflected on an intracultural dating experience. Importantly, cultural learning mediated this effect. Extending the first 2 studies, Study 3 revealed that the duration of past intercultural romantic relationships positively predicted the ability of current employees to generate creative names for marketing products, but the number of past intercultural romantic partners did not. In Study 4, we analyzed an original dataset of 2,226 professional repatriates from 96 countries who had previously worked in the U.S. under J-1 visas: Participants' frequency of contact with American friends since returning to their home countries positively predicted their workplace innovation and likelihood of becoming entrepreneurs. Going out with a close friend or romantic partner from a foreign culture can help people "go out" of the box and into a creative frame of mind. (PsycINFO Database Record