| In our ever-changing global economy knowledge is viewed as the principle source of value creation and sustainable competitive advantage. According to the knowledge management literature, team members connect previously unconnected knowledge and ideas or recombine previously connected ideas, and thus create new knowledge (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998). Culture is central to the shaping of assumptions about what knowledge is worth exchanging and the quality of the social interaction between team members (Srivastava et al., 2006). Cultural diversity is one of the factors that influence the quality of this process through promoting the efficient flow and exchange of such information and knowledge (Hu¨lsheger, Anderson, & Salgado, 2009). Organizations are aware of the importance of cultural diversity and try to tap into it by setting policies and training initiatives in place. However, they often do not show the desired results as their interventions focus more on covering differences by assimilating everyone into a pre-defined and dominant corporate culture (Thomas & Gabarro, 1999). Pless and Maak (2004) write that “being” comes before “doing” and propose establishing a culture that is built on ethical principles and honors the differences as well as the similarities of the individual self and the others. In the same vein, the facilitators of this workshop, use a theoretical framework of 5 levels of knowing and being (Fry and Kriger, 2008) to assess the level of consciousness participants function from and proposes a model of spiritual leadership, the SLM (Fry & Niciewitz, 2013) to cultivate the necessary principles for an inclusive culture. |