The making of Generation G: Education and collaborative teaching to create the next generation of international work and organizational psychologists

The recent, rapid development of international work and organizational psychology (iWOP) is taking place in the context of a broader academic movement toward internationalization in higher education. In the USA, the American Council on Education (ACE), the National Association for Foreign Student Administrators (NAFSA), and the Institute of International Education (IIE) have taken the lead in this movement and many universities have become heavily involved. Similarly, Chinese universities, such as East China Normal University (ECNU), are placing great emphasis on international education. In the European Union, the Erasmus and Erasmus Mundus programs have contributed to this effort. These national and university movements provide a fertile environment in which all disciplines can internationalize. In this chapter, we discuss the educational needs for developing what we will term “Generation G” (the global generation) of professionals in international iWOP, and we review in depth our experiments in providing one kind of educational experience to students, collaborative teaching using international virtual team projects. What will Generation G do? Extrapolating from current trends in academia and in professional practice, this generation will participate directly in a myriad of overseas work experiences or will be indirectly involved through education, training, job analysis, selection, performance evaluation, and other fundamental components of organizational activity. To illustrate, Shaffer, Kraimer, Chen, and Bolino (2012) introduced a typology of "global work experiences" that include corporate expatriates (overseas assignments by a company lasting several years), self-initiated expatriates (people who relocate overseas on their own), short-term assignees (3-12 months), "flexpatriates" (1-2 month assignments in multiple countries), and "international business travelers" (1-3 week trips to multiple countries). What do people who participate in these international work activities need to know to do their jobs effectively? The skill sets are extensive and complex, to say the least. We explore Generation G's required competencies in the first half of this chapter, and then in the remainder of the chapter we present our experiments in "collaborative teaching" as a classroom strategy to build some of these competencies.