Developing cross-cultural skills of international business students: an experiment

Journal of Instructional Psychology, June, 2004 by Steve Sizoo, Hendrick Serrie

Cross-Cultural Incident

This exercise makes use the 110 critical incidents detailed by Cushner and Brislin in their book Intercultural Interactions: A Practical Guide, 2nd edition (1996). Each incident describes a realistic cross-cultural misunderstanding, four plausible explanations for the misunderstanding, and an evaluation of each explanation. The book is a "culture-general assimilator" in that the incidents describe a wide variety of cultural situations and reflect 18 themes that evolved from their research (i.e., anxiety, time and space, ambiguity, prejudice and ethnocentrism, etc.). In this activity students discuss and demonstrate the cross-cultural incidents. The emphasis is on having students experience the cultural conflict rather than simply considering it intellectually.

This exercise addresses the first two cross-cultural management levels--self and interpersonal--by developing skills of recognizing and correcting a cross-cultural error. Students learn to accept the virtual inevitability of their making some cross-cultural errors in the field, but not to accept their repeating the errors. They also learn that errors in appropriate behavior are far worse than mere inability to speak the host country language. The students further learn to strategically recover in such situations, and soon afterwards seek out explanation of their cross-cultural error from a member of the host culture. In addition, they correct their understanding of the host culture and develop a mastery of appropriate cultural behavior in similar situations in the future.

Cross-Cultural Skit

For this exercise, each student is assigned to one of several "Country Groups" that have been formed in the classroom. Each Country Group is headed by one or more foreign students who are native to a particular cultural and who serve as the cultural experts for their group. The group also includes two to four students who are native to America. The Country Groups are charged with planning, writing, and performing a skit before the entire class that illustrates a minimum of five cross-cultural blunders that an American person might make in the host culture represented by the Country Group. Groups must organize the blunders into a business-related scenario involving social interaction between one or more individuals representing Americans and one or more individuals representing host country nationals.

This exercise builds skills and emotional commitment at all three levels of cross-cultural management--self, interpersonal, and institutional--in recognizing and in rejecting the ignorance and arrogance that produces many kinds of cross-cultural errors. The true costs of cross-cultural errors are exposed, including harm to self, harm to others at the interpersonal levels, and harm to the host culture or to the work organization at the institutional level.

Because of the leadership role of the foreign students, every class member is immersed in the native view of the Ugly or Ignorant American. Often foreign students play the parts of the Americans; this an effective way of eliminating the real-life cultural identities of the actors and focusing even more sharply on the defective cross-cultural behavior.