How Culture Is Communicatively Constituted In Intercultural Healthcare Organizations: Leadership Sensegiving, Knowledge Sharing, And Employee Innovation

Healthcare organisations are increasingly intercultural workplaces in which leadership, knowledge sharing, and innovation are shaped through ongoing communicative negotiation across cultural differences. However, much existing research treats culture as a static background condition and under-theorises how leadership communication constitutes organisational realities. Drawing on intercultural communication theory, the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO), and leadership sense-giving, this study examines how culture is communicatively constituted through cross-cultural leadership and how these cultural processes shape knowledge sharing and individual innovation in culturally diverse healthcare organizations. Using a sequential mixed-methods design, qualitative interviews were first conducted to explore how healthcare professionals interpret leaders’ sense-giving as cultural cues that define legitimacy and participation. A subsequent quantitative study tested a sequential mediation model. The results show that leadership sense-giving constitutes an inclusive organisational culture, which fosters knowledge sharing and enables individual innovation. By foregrounding culture as an emergent communicative process, this study advances intercultural communication research by explaining how leadership communication becomes consequential for innovation in healthcare contexts. Practically, the findings suggest that culturally inclusive leadership sensegiving can be enacted through everyday healthcare routines, such as team meetings, clinical handovers, and shared decision-making processes, to support knowledge sharing and innovation.