The Stage of Multicultural Leadership : Challenges and Opportunities which leaders are facing nowadays

Abstract: Working, communicating, socialising and proceeding in multicultural environments are not always easily put into practice. The contrary is the case, it poses various challenges. These challenges will be investigated within this work with a specific focus on the research issues: Which changes leadership needs to face in terms of adapting to new multicultural circumstances? And if so, how to do it? As well as the question about how to strengthen the cultural competences of respective leaders or future-leaders in order to facilitate working and social corporate processes in a company or an organisation. The approximation with Grounded Theory will be conducted as the methodology approach in this thesis. It allows us, as the creator of knowledge, to break the collected data which is gathered within several interviews in order to create thematically concepts out of them and afterwards to relate the respective concepts to each other.  As a result, potential challenges occurring in multicultural environments regarding the collaboration with each other will be identified as well as suggestions of solution in terms of how a leader should face these challenges in order to create chances out of them. Concretely, a guide will point out the most important research insights, based on the experiences by seven interviewees who perceived working in cultural diverse surroundings out of the leadership perspective. The guide´s main target is to evince a way of direction for leaders and/or future-leaders who want to turn potential daily challenges into opportunities. It is a quick checklist that can be used in order to ensure cultural differences as valuable resources instead of barriers for the achievement of the companies’ success whatsoever.  “A leader is someone who helps improve the lives of other people or improve the system they live under.” – Sam Houston.