Rethinking Manager’s Core Competence Paradigm by Integrating Intercultural Competence at Its Heart

Abstract Manager’s role has become more complex along the decades due to social, economic and political changes that affected business worldwide. This paper is part of a larger project to highlight the importance of intercultural competence as a core management competence in an era of globalization, workforce cultural diversity, international business, worldwide connectivity. Based on a thorough bibliographic investigation including books, statistics, relevant business literature and journals, articles, research studies, meta-analysis, mega-trends analysis, we demonstrate the need to review the most important management trends and paradigms for a better understanding of a manager’s role along the time and at present and we bring arguments to support a manager’s core competence paradigm by integrating intercultural competence at its heart. By direct observation and informal interviews with managers working in multinationals exposed to a multicultural environment, we collected and presented several case studies in our paper to show that successful managers should possess intercultural competency in order to manage cross-culturally for their teams’ wellbeing and efficiency and for company productivity.