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

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

Cross-Cultural News

Each student finds a newspaper or magazine article that describes an American work organization adapting, or having difficulty in adapting, to the host cultural of a foreign country. The students then write an analysis of the cross-cultural differences and explain why the American organization is successful or unsuccessful in resolving its cross-cultural differences. This exercise builds analytical skills at the third or institutional level of cross-cultural management. Students become acquainted with cases involving well-known organizations confronting cultural differences that result in real and crucial consequences at the institutional level and which offer parallels to the personal and interpersonal levels that they have already experienced.

Cross-Cultural Management

For this exercise each student conceives, plans and carries out a program for improving the cross-cultural relations between the two most culturally separated and alienated groups on campus--the participants in the ESL program and students in the regular college program. At a very minimum, each student must bring together at least two foreign students and two domestic students who have never met before, and organize pleasant activities and interesting discussions that will foster cross-cultural understanding and friendship. A short proposal must be approved in advance and after the program a final report must be submitted that summarizing the activity, the quality of the interaction, and evidence of improvement in cross-cultural relations among the persons involved.

This exercise builds skills at all three levels of cross-cultural management, for it involves mastery of self, of interpersonal relations, and of the dynamics of small groups. It is the most difficult of all the exercises, and represents the culmination of the four exercises preceding it. In this exercise, each student becomes an agent of cultural change within his or her own organization, and is equipped with knowledge and skills to figure out a way to actually make a real improvement in a problematic multicultural institutional situation. Some of the successful cross-cultural management programs have involved getting together to cook a meal, going to the beach, going bowling, or organizing baseball or soccer games.

The quality of cross-cultural relations on most campuses does not yield to official actions, and tends to remain poor or inadequate over decades. The reason why official ministrations have little impact on the quality of cross-cultural relations in campus life is that fundamentally this is a problem rooted in interpersonal interaction. No structural changes can force different individuals to meet each other and develop friendly relationships. The solution lies in establishing and multiplying interpersonal connections at the level of the individual.

Although the five exercises may be used separately, when used collectively they are related and synergistic. While the news exercise is academic, the others are experiential and engage the emotions. The incident and news exercises require intellectual analysis of real events that have already happened. The interview, skit, and management exercises require planned personal action. The interview and management exercise also involve interactions in the real world. These five exercises strongly reinforce each student's sense of being empowered to make a positive difference in difficult cultural situations that they will carry into their future interpersonal careers. (Assignment sheets for each exercise are available from the authors at sizoos1@eckerd.edu)