In an increasingly global business environment, managers must interact effectively with people who have different values, behavioral norms, and ways of perceiving reality. Many jobs now entail an international dimension, so the need to develop intercultural competences has taken on a greater importance for more people in business than ever before.

Intercultural competence is the ability to recognize and use cultural differences as a resource for learning and for generating effective responses in specific contexts. The approach of a “negotiating reality” draws on concepts from international management, sociology, cross-cultural psychology, action science and conflict resolution. The challenge of communicating ideas and making decisions with people from different cultural backgrounds is no longer limited to a relatively elite group of expatriate managers who develop skills and knowledge by living abroad for years at a time.

Another feature of the intensification of intercultural interactions in recent years is their diversity. Many managers have to be able to interact effectively with people from very varied backgrounds, often for only short periods - a negotiation, a task force - and with little or no time to acquire knowledge about the cultures that the others come from. Under these circumstances, managers need to come equipped with intercultural competence more than with knowledge about a culture that is foreign to them. They can then draw on their intercultural competence to learn what they need to know about the culturally shaped expectations and norms of their counterparts in each new situation.

We share the assumption that the more people differ, the more they have to teach and learn from each other. To do so, of course, there must be mutual respect and sufficient curiosity to overcome the frustrations that often accompany intercultural encounters. The core elements of intercultural competence therefore include an active awareness of oneself as a complex cultural being and the effect of one’s own culture on thinking and action, an ability to engage with others to explore tacit assumptions that underlie behavior and goals, and an openness to testing out different ways of thinking and doing things. These competencies enable people to discover differing views of reality, making it more likely that they will create common understandings and generate collaborative action.

No single discipline suffices to capture the cognitive and behavioral dimensions of the impact of culture on interactions, nor is there one body of theory that provides guidance for developing approaches to dealing more effectively with the challenges the dynamics of such interactions pose. We discuss these issues with our clients and provide suitable solutions to cope with the challenges of the intercultural environment at the workplace as well as the private surrounding.

Contact us for further information.