Cultural intelligence in global teams: A fusion model of collaboration

This article introduces a new, culturally intelligent model of collaboration for global teams that is intended to enhance the likelihood of such teams making creatively realistic decisions. The conceptualization for this new fusion model of global team collaboration draws on the culinary tradition of fusion cooking, current political theorizing about pluralistic societies, as well as theories conformation processing and political decision making. We describe how the fusion principle of coexistence facilitates information extraction and decision making, and we recommend formal interventions to counterbalance the unequal power relations among global team members. We contrast the fusion model to models of collaboration based on principles of the dominant coalition and of integration and/or identity, pointing out why fusion is a more culturally intelligent model for team collaboration, producing superior solutions to global problems.