Travel and living abroad good for developing better managers

Travel and living abroad have long been seen as good for the soul.

What’s perhaps less well-known is that they’re also good for the company.

People who have international experience or identify with more than one nationality are better problem solvers and display more creativity, our research suggests.

What’s more, we found that people with this international experience are more likely to create new businesses and products and to be promoted.

For example, we ran an experiment in which 220 MBA students from Northwestern’s Kellogg School were asked to solve the famous Duncker candle problem.

In this behavioural test, individuals are presented with three objects on a table: a candle, a pack of matches, and a box of tacks.

They’re asked to attach the candle to a cardboard wall— using only the objects on the table — so that the candle burns properly and does not drip wax on the floor.

The correct solution demands the ability to think creatively: Empty the box of tacks and use it as a candleholder. The solution is considered a measure of “insight creativity” because it involves making the “aha!” discovery that the box is not just a repository for your tools but a tool itself.

We found that the longer students had spent living abroad, the more likely they were to use the box as a candleholder.

In fact, 60 percent of students who had previously lived abroad solved the problem compared with 42 percent of students who hadn’t lived abroad.

Interestingly, time spent travelling abroad had no effect on creativity.

In another study, we asked undergraduates at the Sorbonne to complete a creativity test called the Remote Associates Task (RAT).

Participants were shown three words and asked to come up with a word that is associated with all of them.

(For example, for “manners,” “round,” and “tennis,” they’d need to come up with “table”: table manners, round table, table tennis.)

The students who recalled and wrote about an experience living abroad just before doing the RAT answered more questions correctly than those who recalled and wrote about other experiences.