Case study:
Cultivating Intercultural Competence in Academic Leadership
Executive Summary
This case study explores a strategic intervention at an UK University designed to enhance cultural awareness and intercultural competency among senior academic staff. The project utilised the Cultural Orientations Framework (COF) and coaching techniques to navigate the complexities of a diverse higher education environment. By engaging with Deputy Heads of Departments, the study highlights some of the management challenges, and providing a space for reflection, discussion and opportunity for integrating Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) into the fabric of academic leadership.
Context
Higher education institutions are microcosms of global diversity, where cultural differences within staff and student bodies can be misunderstood or managed through a lens of ethnocentrism. University leadership recognised that fostering innovation and collaboration requires more than just structural diversity, it requires intercultural competence.
Objectives
The workshops were designed to explore the leadership team’s cultural identity and perspectives, the core aims included:
o Reflecting on personal cultural norms and values,
o Managing team differences for positive institutional impact,
o Identifying solutions to complex, multidimensional academic challenges through the lens of diversity.
Methodology: a multi-dimensional approach
The cohort consisted of Deputy Heads of Departments representing diverse disciplines within the university. The intervention combined psychometric tools with reflective workshops. Assessment tools used:
o Explore identity, heritage, and ancestry to highlight immediate group diversity,
o Construct a cultural diversity journey: a longitudinal reflection on societal factors shaping each participant's worldview,
o Myers-Briggs Type Indicator used to distinguish between innate personality traits and learned cultural preferences,
o Cultural Orientations Framework: the primary analytical tool used to map individual and group inclinations across dimensions.
Analysis of key findings:
The COF results revealed misalignments between the university’s operational culture and the personal and professional values of the academic leadership. Some findings are given below:
Power and Responsibility: Control vs. Harmony: the team demonstrated high proficiency in control i.e. forging outcomes through effort. A discord was identified as participants felt that the institutional push for control, manifested through rigid KPIs and grant submission quotas, was detrimental to staff wellbeing.
A tension between ‘Quantity vs. Quality’ as the focus on the number of outputs was perceived to erode the quality of academic work and professional relationships.
Institutional Challenges: the study connected the cultural orientations to institutional metrics, for example, the post-covid void meant the persistent lack of physical presence, particularly among PhD students, had disrupted traditional and valuable knowledge-sharing ecosystems.
Strategic recommendations and solutions
The feedback from the participants was unequivocal, there is a high demand for these soft competencies to be integrated into departmental policy.
Some key findings for Leadership and Management:
o KPI realignment: shift from purely quantitative data to qualitative measures of success, such as the quality of research environments and relationship health.
o DEI endorsement: move DEI from a box-ticking exercise to a core leadership value.
For Student Engagement:
o Cultural onboarding: improve support for international students by explicitly addressing cultural shifts in hierarchy and social norms e.g., the difference between UK academic styles and more hierarchical home cultures.
o Cognitive diversity: actively promote the value of diverse perspectives in the classroom to prepare students for global employment.
Conclusion:
The work with the Deputy Head team demonstrates that cultural awareness is not a luxury but a functional necessity. By using the COF, the team moved beyond surface-level diversity to address the systemic tensions between institutional doing and academic being. The shift from an Ethnocentric to an Ethnorelative mindset allows leaders to see differences not as obstacles to be managed, but as assets to be leveraged. As the university moves toward its goals, the ability of its leadership to ‘sit with the uncomfortable’ and shift perspectives will be the determining factor in closing attainment gaps and fostering a truly collaborative research community.