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Excerpt from course description

Multicultural Leadership

Introduction

Leadership of Diversity.

Not only is business life becoming more and more global, but the work force in Norway is also becoming more and more diversified. Research consistently shows that organisations with diversified teams can increase the team’s creativity, performance and inclusivity. To capitalise on these benefits, organisations need leaders who are extremely culturally intelligent, and who understand the cultural backgrounds, beliefs and attitudes of the people around them. Multicultural teams are often made up of people who otherwise seldom interact with each other. For this reason, leading a multicultural team can also be an enriching experience that widens a leader’s perspective in terms of personal and professional growth. Equally, leading such a team of genuinely different people brings with it a range of challenges to be solved, so that the team can be effective within a constructive and secure environment for all who participate.

 

In this programme you will learn how to lead within multicultural and multireligious challenges at micro-, meso- and macro level, both within the public and private sectors. Through the programme you will acquire knowledge about the central theories and important research within this field, as well as analytical competence to evaluate multicultural situations. You will also gain practical skills to deal with concrete situations and problems. The programme will increase your dialectical awareness by highlighting dilemmas and paradoxes that do not necessarily have easy solutions. This will give you ideas and new perspectives with which to measure your own solutions against both contemporary and historical multicultural solutions. The programme will provoke and challenge you as a leader. It will change your mindset and your leadership qualities.

Course content

  • Multicultural leadership as a crucial quality in future leaders
  • Leadership of multicultural and diversified teams
  • Multicultural challenges in HR-related questions
  • Religion as a source of conflict: belief vs belief, religion vs secularisation
  • Convivencia and Còrdoba: Can religions co-exist?
  • How we form groups: biology, culture and social categorisation
  • Prejudices and ethnocentrism
  • Theories about intragroup and intergroup relations as an important tool for understanding multicultural challenges
  • Can the subaltern speak: Post-colonial and subaltern studies of Western reproduction of differences
  • Assimilation vs multiculturalism
  • Identity, not as a personal, but as a social construct
  • The need for acknowledgement of one’s identity
  • Development towards an increasingly mixed-race society: fight, flight, repress or join?
  • Liberalism vs popular nationalism
  • The challenges of liberalism in a time characterised by migration and multiculturalism
  • How gender is used to deny some people social rights
  • Gender as a central problem within many multicultural differences
  • Leadership within multicultural paradoxes and dilemmas

Disclaimer

This is an excerpt from the complete course description for the course. If you are an active student at BI, you can find the complete course descriptions with information on eg. learning goals, learning process, curriculum and exam at portal.bi.no. We reserve the right to make changes to this description.