Stacey Fitzsimmons is Assistant Professor of Management at the Haworth College of Business, Western Michigan University. She specializes in cross-cultural management research, with a particular interest in understanding how bicultural and multicultural individuals contribute to global business. She received her doctorate in International Business from the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Abstract
Organizations are experiencing a rise in a new demographic of employees – bicultural and multicultural individuals. These are individuals who have internalized two or more cultures, such as German-Danes, Chinese-Canadians or Arab-Americans. Despite promising findings about the skills multicultural employees bring to their positions, they remain an untapped resource in most companies, because managers first need to understand how they can contribute to organizations. The framework developed in this paper draws on cognitive and motivational mechanisms from social identity theory to explain how multicultural employees organize their multiple cultural identities into patterns, and in turn, how those patterns influence benefits and challenges for themselves, and for their organizations.