A Flair for Fashion: Professional Multicultural Experience and Creative Performance

Abstract

Although previous research has demonstrated that certain types of multicultural experiences facilitate creativity, most of this evidence has been limited to laboratory studies. The current research examines and refines these effects in a business context, the one where creative performance essentially defines success – the global fashion industry. We predicted and found that the longer creative directors of top fashion houses had worked abroad (i.e., the depth of their multicultural experiences) and the more countries they had worked in (i.e., the breadth of their multicultural experiences), the more creative their fashion houses were rated. Moreover, breadth and depth of experiences abroad functioned synergistically. However, the positive effect of working abroad was found to diminish over time once directors had been abroad for several decades. This link between multicultural experience and creativity held even when controlling for other important variables (directors’ age, gender, previous experience) ...