Streamline Training & Documentation: Intercultural Competence

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Intercultural Competence

With European Community financing, a team of experts in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, and the UK have undertaken an extensive program for assessing and helping improve employees' intercultural competence, defined as the ability

to interact both effectively and in a way that is acceptable to others when you are working in a group whose members have different cultural backgrounds.

... "cultural" may denote all manner of features, including the values and beliefs you have grown up with, your national customs and, in particular, attitudes and practices that affect the way you work. (emphasis in original)¹

The INCA (Intercultural Cultural Assessment) project identified six dimensions of intercultural competence:

Tolerance for ambiguity — willingness and ability to manage ambiguous situations.

Behavioral flexibility — readiness to apply and augment the full range of one's repertoire of behaviors; adapting one's behavior to specific requirements and situations.

Communicative awareness — negotiating appropriate communication conventions for intercultural communication, and coping with different foreign language skills.

Knowledge discovery — curiosity about other cultures, both for their own sake and in order to be able to interact better with other people.

Respect for otherness — readiness to suspend belief about the "naturalness" of one's own culture and to believe in the "naturalness" of other cultures.

Empathy — willingness to take another person's perspective; ability to relate and respond in appropriate ways to the feelings, preferences and ways of thinking of others.²

The above list is not intended to be exhaustive. Rather, it's "a snapshot, useful as an asessment tool, in order to provide a baseline which can inform training programmes."³ The INCA materials describe three levels of performance: Basic, Intermediate, and Full.

For assessing intercultural competence, INCA has developed a diagnostic tool that has three components:

Questionnaires — one to capture biographical information, including information about an assessee's work background and his/her past intercultural contacts and experiences; and an intercultural profile that uses Likert scale responses to 21 statements to help the assessee reflect on his/her intercultural experiences to date, thereby identifying strengths and weaknesses.

Scenarios — Several text-based intercultural encounters, and one video-based "Business Trip to China." The assessee answers multiple choice and open-ended questions.

Role playing — One role play in which the assessee explains a fairly complicated procedure to a foreigner who does not speak the assessee's language very well; and a second role play in which the assessee is a member of a multicultural team working on assembling a truck.

As is typical with European Community-sponsored projects, INCA is thoroughly documented, with all materials available online. Anyone in search of tested ideas for building employees' intercultural competence can find much worth consideration at the INCA website.
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¹ INCA Assesee Manual, p. 3.

²For a discussion of the importance of empathy for business leaders, see this earlier post.

³ www.incaproject.org/framework.htm.

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Labels: Competencies, Employee development, Organizational culture

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