A professor of social work and business with years of international experience, she is fascinated by cross-cultural miscommunications. She cites an example: “When I first went to China several years ago as an official guest of the China Youth College for Political Science and Beijing University, I was invited to a roundtable meeting. The typical Western assumption is that this sort of table implies equality among the participants and each can randomly choose his or her seat with no attention to rank. But I immediately observed that my hosts were using a very careful method to seat the participants.

“It turns out that in China, the most important person sits directly facing the main entrance, and the rest of the participants sit in descending order to both sides. The logic behind this is that the person who sits at a table across from the main entrance has more control – they can see who is coming and going – as well as more protection, should there be an attack. A guest who is not familiar with this system, and who simply takes a random seat, would of course be considered rude and disrespectful.

“On the flip side, when some of my Chinese doctoral students came to the U.S., they initially waited to be told where to sit. The Americans in the room assumed that they were just shy and unassertive.”

Mor Barak doesn’t just relish these cross-cultural disconnects, she teaches them, and grounds them not only around the boardroom table, but also in the workplace at large. “There’s a term we use, called ‘naïve realism,’ ” she says. “It’s the assumption that our understanding of each other is mutual. But it could mean that as you look me in the eye, or take a seat at my boardroom table, you’re disrespecting me, or you’re being fresh with me.”

She continues: “I regularly break these basic cultural assumptions with students, and open them up to different behaviors and ways of communicating, of listening, of accepting. Once you have that kind of greater understanding, you’re more equipped to be effective in the global environment.”

But just how do touchy-feely concepts of understanding and acceptance, and straighten-up-and-fly-right efficacy come together in a global environment? For Mor Barak, they’re a natural pair; in her research she marries two disciplines not readily introduced in academia: social work and business. She is the Lenore Stein-Wood and William S. Wood Professor of Social Work and Business in a Global Society at the USC School of Social Work and the USC Marshall School of Business, where she chairs the former school’s work and life concentration. Mor Barak, in whatever discipline she works, teaches the importance of taking care when crossing cultural and social divides.

She moves easily between academia and high-powered corporate clients such as TRW and Southern California Edison. Given that as little as a decade ago, practically no one else was tossing about such buzzwords as “diversity management paradigms” or “workplace inclusion,” Mor Barak has carved out an academic niche for herself that is now very much in vogue, one that addresses current corporate conundrums with sensitivity, logic and solid data sets. Her colleagues credit her with coining the term “globally inclusive workplace” about a decade ago, defining its values and policies and giving it flesh and blood through practical examples.

There’s a good reason why her work is so timely: “Push-pull” factors are creating a more diverse workforce both here and abroad. Low birthrates, increased longevity and dramatic industrial expansion have been the recent case in developed countries, which have needed larger and larger waves of immigrants to maintain their current ratio of workers to retirees. By contrast, in developing countries, an unprecedented surge of young people is trying to obtain jobs in economies that are too small to accommodate the increase. Migration is now de rigueur, as is a more diverse workforce.

But there’s another, more basic reason why better listening and understanding in the workplace have come to the fore, Mor Barak says. “The public has less and less patience with corporate corruption and faulty procedures that result in exploitation, such as at Enron, Tyco and their likes. It is no longer enough for companies to conduct their business with integrity and responsibility towards their shareholders. The public now expects businesses to add another fundamental quality – integration with society.”

But isn’t greed still good, as Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko once suggested? Perhaps so, but Mor Barak does not see a contradiction between conducting business in a socially responsive way and making money. In fact, she insists that corporations can “do well by doing good.”

Michàlle Mor Barak was born and raised in Israel. She claims that her instinct for helping others was innate, and might have been triggered at the age of 6. “My parents bought a kids’ encyclopedia from a traveling salesman. One of the stories in it that really affected me was about Jane Addams, one of America’s pioneering social workers, and the founder of Hull House, an early settlement house in Chicago. I was really moved by it, and actually think that it helped to determine my life’s course.”

As soon as she was old enough, Mor Barak pursued her nurturing path, starting with her role in the Israeli army. “I got to be a noncommissioned officer social worker. As the military draft is mandatory in Israel, the Israelis really feel like it’s the people’s army, and feel a responsibility to take care of soldiers and their families. To this effect, I was assigned to assist soldiers in dealing with emotional and family-related problems. I’d visit families, assess the issues, and make suggestions to the unit commander. Where else in the world does an 18-year-old tell her commander that a soldier needs a three-week vacation to take care of his ailing mother, and the commander says, ‘Sure!’? It was an empowering experience. Additionally, helping soldiers and their families adjust to their situation is very, very important to accomplishing the mission.”

Mor Barak completed her service and got her BA in social work, after which she studied in Israel’s Technion industrial engineering school (“Of all things!” she says), before receiving a Fulbright scholarship and a UC Regents fellowship to complete her Ph.D. in social welfare at UC Berkeley.

Another professional experience that helped her hone her own mission was landing a position that involved working with other cultures.

“I was employed as a social worker at an international shipping company headquartered in Haifa, training managers on human relations issues,” she says. “But the position also involved interacting with seamen and their families. The employees of the company were from all over the world. In one ship, for example, there was an Israeli captain, a chief engineer from Norway and officers from Italy and Argentina. The able-bodied sailors were from China and the Philippines, and the language everyone spoke to one another was English.

“I saw that diversity could do a lot, both in terms of creating an interesting mix and a productive team, and also in terms of creating barriers to communication. Another issue was that the seamen would have long separations from their families, going on journeys of five weeks to three months. For the kids and the wives, the fathers and husbands would not be at home for the long duration of the seafaring journey, then suddenly they’d be home all day for a few weeks at a time during their break.

“I held group therapy sessions with the wives, and would ask them, ‘What’s the most difficult part of your life?’ To my surprise, they’d say that it was when their husbands would come home. ‘He comes home, and wants to assert his authority as the man of the house, when I’ve been the person in charge! Then he goes away again! It’s very difficult, as well as confusing for the kids.’ I called them ‘accordion families’; they’d expand and contract.”

When Mor Barak was awarded a Fulbright in 1982 and went to UC Berkeley, “I knew then that I wanted to make this connection between industry and social work, that I wanted to practice helping workers in organizations make connections at the personal and the community level. There was no professor at Berkeley whose field this was, but the faculty members were so great, they said, ‘Do what you need to do.’ So I did. One thing led to another, and upon graduation from Berkeley, I interviewed at USC and was offered the position on the spot. This was a great opportunity to do research exactly in my field, combining social work and business, and the people were so nice and lovely, I said, ‘Sure!’ ”

In 1995, Mor Barak had an epiphany while on a consulting gig (she insists she never takes on consulting work unless there’s a research opportunity involved). “The aerospace giant TRW asked me to work for it on a company-wide diversity initiative. But I didn’t have a hook, so I just started with qualitative interviews – I really just asked the employees and managers at all levels of the company about their experiences.”

She identified the usual issues: “There were problems around gender and ethnic and racial differences, and perceptions that people had about each other as a team. The production managers sometimes had a difficult time because of management silos.”

Then the hook presented itself. “But when I looked harder at all the interviews, I realized that all of them mentioned issues of inclusion,” she says, using the now oft-used term she helped put on the map. “It was a revelation.”

She illustrates the word with an example. “New York and New Jersey’s Port Authority was experiencing increasing problems in delivering quality transportation due to the rising number of homeless people at the terminals. In 1988, the authority took action by forming a homeless project team, and funding homeless centers. Since 1997, the program has provided referral services to more than 500 people a month. The agency also created the Open Door Center to provide food, shelter and social services right across from the terminal. As a result of this intervention, the homeless people in the community received much-needed food, clothing and shelter, and the Port Authority was able to provide better services to its customers, as well as improve its image.”

With this and other examples, she drew up a micro-to-macro-based model that defined the “inclusive workplace” as one that values and utilizes individual and inter-group differences within its workforce; cooperates with and contributes to its surrounding community; alleviates the needs of disadvantaged groups in its wider national environment; and collaborates with individuals, groups and organizations across national and cultural boundaries. Her research since has demonstrated that inclusion was a key ingredient in recruitment and retention of talent as well as in job satisfaction and organizational commitment.

On the heels of this breakthrough, Mor Barak won a competitive Rockefeller Foundation grant to organize a conference on diversity management, which was held in July 2001 at the foundation’s Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy. (The glamorous location was bequeathed to the foundation with the stipulation that scholars would use it to generate new ideas.) Twenty-four international participants from across many disciplines were invited to help her hash out her theories: There were scholars of business, economics, sociology, demography, social work and psychology, as well as the CEO of a large company and the chief of the migrant unit in the UN’s International Labour Organization. “This was an opportunity for me to present the model of the inclusive workplace that I had formulated earlier,” says Mor Barak. “It was tested by the incomparable company.”

Colleague Ellen Ernst Kossek of Michigan State University says it was one of the best conferences of scholars she ever attended. What was striking, she says, was learning the diversity of perspectives as well as “the barriers and facilitators to a common understanding of an inclusive workplace.”

In a meta-moment, Mor Barak continues, ever the observer of cultural differences: “What was interesting was watching the scholars try to cross boundaries. To some extent, it was easier to cross national boundaries than disciplinary boundaries. It was easier to have an economist from Mexico and an economist from Sweden communicate or come to an understanding, rather than having a European sociologist communicate with another European, say, an economist.”

Mor Barak seems to have a knack for putting together worldly outings. Her follow-up conference two years later, which continued to focus on the inclusive workplace, was held at Brittany’s Chateau de la Bretesche, thanks to a grant from the Borchard Foundation. She says jokingly, “My colleagues love associating with me!” As do others. On a fortuitous note, Mor Barak and her husband, Ysreal Kanot, decided to marry at the chateau after the conference’s end.

Mor Barak’s third book, Managing Diversity: Towards A Globally Inclusive Workplace, emerged from her research during the previous decade as well as these two conferences. Winner of the prestigious 2007 George Terry Book Award from the Academy of Management for “the most significant contribution to management knowledge,” Managing Diversity also garnered an Outstanding Academic Title of 2006 Award by Choice, a publication of the Association of College and University Libraries. Wrote Corodula Barzantny, associate professor of international management at the Toulouse Business School, in her review in The Academy of Management Learning and Education, “All international management classes as well as classes on leadership should use at least parts of the book.”

The book’s impact has been felt worldwide. Mor Barak says she receives emails from all over the world asking for additional information or clarification. “I’ve heard from people in the Netherlands, Slovenia, Turkey, Mexico, India, even Newfoundland!” The book’s chapters cover global demographic trends, legislation, public policies and cross-cultural analysis, among other topics, with examples of successful workplace inclusiveness and rich case studies.

In one of the latter, Mor Barak poses the question, “Are members of a cultural group interacting with a member of another group more likely to change their original communication style, or reinforce it?” Her answer is that during crisis situations, people typically fall back on their own original cultural communication style rather than adapting to the other group’s cultural style. She demonstrates it with a revealing anecdote: Because management was unable to connect with its workers, an incident at a South African mining company exploded into a labor dispute and a strike.

The workers had invited the upper-echelon managers to meet with them about their grievance, but the managers refused, instead sending messages through intermediaries, and posting statements on public bulletin boards. The hands-off stance and avoidance of direct communication with the workers backfired. The workers walked out, causing the company multi-million-dollar losses as well as the laying off of hundreds of employees. Had they better understood the native South African tradition of ubuntu, a.k.a. the compassionate and community-oriented sense of one-ness and direct communication well known in the townships, management could have saved itself the aggravation, as well as a lot of money. Said one employee bitterly, “The only thing that employees wanted was for top management to come and address us. Just to speak to us.”

Mor Barak also includes in her book an analysis of cultural non-verbal communication, and discussions of the Declaration of Human Rights, economics and social identity theory, CNN reports from the Iraqi battlefields and excerpts from the July 1943 issue of Mass Transportation, used to demonstrate a point about past discrimination against female employees: “Give every girl an adequate number of rest periods during the day. You have to make some allowances for feminine psychology. A girl has more confidence and is more efficient if she can keep her hair tidied, apply fresh lipstick and wash her hands several times a day.”

Finally, a well-chosen quote from Antoine de St. Exupery’s The Little Prince sums up the cultural and social distrust that the book tries to debunk as it highlights the potential for better workplace achievement: “I have serious reasons to believe that the planet the little prince came from is Asteroid B-612. This asteroid has been sighted only once by telescope, in 1909 by a Turkish astronomer, who had then made a formal demonstration of his discovery at an International Astronomical Congress. But no one had believed him, on account of the way he was dressed. Grown-ups are like that.”

Mor Barak utilizes the same close attention to detail when instructing her graduate-level students. “Professor Mor Barak’s commitment to her students is fantastic!” gushes University of Texas at Austin assistant professor of social work Dnika Travis, PhD ’06, who had Mor Barak as an adviser. “It was so wonderful for me to be guided by her, not just because of the brilliant content that she teaches, but also because of how generous she was regarding how I teach. She really taught me a lot.”

Mor Barak teaches social practice in the workplace, an interdisciplinary course in global diversity management and two doctoral statistics courses, as well as advising master’s and doctoral students. (For her advising skills, she was given a USC-Mellon Award for Excellence in Mentoring.) She notes with pride that her students go on to help workers with individual, career and family-related problems, as well as organizational development and change. “Some go into human resources; one who got a joint MSW-MBA was hired by Warner Brother in HR, one was hired by Texaco….”

She is particularly proud of the multiple-party international teleconferencing classes on global diversity she holds. USC students participate in classrooms in Los Angeles and Orange County, and guest speakers (professors and corporate managers) in other countries take part digitally, in real time, via split-screen. Recently, Nico Lüdtke, head of supplier development for German aerospace giant Liebherr, spoke to a noontime class while he was in Toulouse, France (it was 9 p.m. for him), about cultural sensitivities he deals with in India, Brazil and elsewhere.

Next year, Mor Barak will be on the leading team for a new USC social work program titled “Social Work in the Military.” “It’s the first of its kind in the nation,” she says excitedly. “The goal is to make this like JAG. There’s a school that trains all the lawyers, and we hope to be that for the military and to train all the social workers, all the while creating a different social work model for the military and their families. It’s going to be a very innovative program.”

When asked what else the future holds for her besides writing a new edition of her book, Mor Barak says she is ready for her next research challenge. She explains: “I would love to have access to a global company that has branches in many places. There, I’d like to put together an intervention based on my model of inclusion and socially responsible practices and apply it across different cultures, and see how it works.”

As she already is conducting research with a large, high-profile company with factories overseas, she feels she is approaching her wish. In her work with the company, which she prefers not to identify until her research is completed, she has been busy documenting culturally entrenched problems with workers. She gives an example from a Latin American factory that is overseen by Asian managers.

“In some Asian countries, family members have very specific roles: The wife stays home and takes care of the kids, while the husband goes off to work. But at that Latin American plant, there were a lot of women employees, especially single women and moms. One day, one of the moms didn’t come to work – her child fell ill. The Asian manager, not realizing that she might be the sole provider for the child, was angry, and it fed into his expectations of what he believed Latin American women to be – not committed to their work. He wondered: ‘Why should I invest in them? They’re not devoted to the company.’

“It was a simple misunderstanding, one that occurs in the business world a lot,” says Mor Barak, keen on ferreting out life’s miscommunications. She shakes her head. “Sure, business is about making money, but it centers around people, and people need jobs for their livelihood, for their families and their communities. What I’d like to see is business become more sensitive and responsive to culture, to the community, to people. Because it’s the right thing to do. From the business perspective. From all perspectives.”

If you have questions or comments on this article, please send them to magazines@usc.edu.

Elizabeth Segal’s most recent article for USC Trojan Family Magazine was a profile of economist Richard Easterlin, founding father of “happiness economics.”