Building and monitoring trans-cultural competences

1. Building and monitoring trans-cultural competences Erika Vaiginiene Erika.vaiginiene@ef.vu.lt Vilnius University Lithuania

2. Competence is on of the most important factors that may explain firms existence, boundaries, structure and development at all.

3. Synonymsof “Trans-culturalcompetence” • Intercultural competence • International competence • Global competence

4. Cross-cultural competence • the ability of individuals to function effectively in another culture; • a set of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, agency, or among professionals and enables that system, agency, or those professionals to work effectively in cross-cultural situations; • is an individual’s effectiveness in drawing upon a set of knowledge, skills, and personal attributes in order to work successfully with people from different national cultural backgrounds at home or abroad.

5. Prerequisites for cross-cultural competence • In order to be culturally competent, an individual would have to: • (1) possess a strong personal identity; • (2) have knowledge of and facility with the beliefs and values of the culture; • (3) display sensitivity to the affective processes of the culture; • (4) communicate clearly in the language of the given cultural group; • (5) perform specially sanctioned behavior; • (6) maintain active social relations within the cultural group; • (7) negotiate the institutional structures of that culture. • Individual’s ability to step outside his/her cultural boundary, to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange, and to act on that change of perspective. • Individual must have the motivation to use the knowledge available.

6. Personal competence (Johnson, Lenartowicz and Apud, 2006)

7. Personal attributes • Values; • Beliefs, norms • Personal characteristics • Unconstrained curiosity • Flexibility; • Decisiveness; • Perseverance; • Sincerity; • Duality • Perception • Self-Efficacy, etc…

8. Personal skills • The Oxford Dictionary defines skill as ‘expertness, or practiced facility in doing something’; • It is the behavioral component of CC, and includes abilities and aptitudes; • Important abilities for CCs: • foreign language competence, • adapting to the behavioral norms of a different cultural environment, • effective stress-management, or conflict resolution.

9. Cultural knowledge - has a positive effect on other [cross-cultural competence] attributes and maximizes intercultural competency.

10. Culture-general knowledge • a focus on awareness and knowledge of cultural differences. • includes an examination of the participant’s own mental makeup and how it differs from that of others. • applies to any cultural environment; • deals less with how to live in any specific culture and instead focuses on how to work effectively in a cross-cultural environment. • includes the components of culture, how cultural values are learned, and frameworks for understanding and comparing/contrasting different cultures. • a general knowledge of the complex environment in which international business operates, within the different economic, political, legal, social, financial and technological systems that co-exist.

11. Culture-specific knowledge • focus on specific knowledge about another culture; • includes information about geography, economics, politics, law, history, customs, hygiene, what to do, and what not to do – but spends little time on the participants’ own cultural introspection. • includes learning the language of the culture, although the ability to communicate effectively in the foreign language is more properly categorized as a skill.

12. A model of cross-cultural competence in international business (Johnson, Lenartowicz and Apud, 2006)

13. Institutional ethnocentrism • Appointment of home country nationals to key executive positions in overseas affiliates; • Imposing of “the ways of working” at the headquarters in the home culture on affiliates abroad ; • Promotes the home culture’s ways of doing things; • The extent to which institutional ethnocentrism affects the operations of a foreign subsidiary depends on the tightness of the organizational culture; • Can impair the expatriate employees’ ability to work effectively with other national groups

14. Cultural distance • overall difference in national culture between the home country and affiliates overseas. • as the cultural distance increases, the difficulties facing business processes overseas also increase; • reflects not only difference in cultural values, but also in other environmental variables, too, such as the language, the economy, and the political and legal systems.

15. Cross-Cultural Competence in International Business (Johnson, Lenartowicz and Apud, 2006)

16. Competence building • International trips; • Experience of work in a global team; • International training; • Foreign assignments.

17. Impediments for International training • many cultural training programs fail because they tend to put too much emphasis on culture-specific knowledge ‘at the expense of a more general learning principle’; • training programs do not meet the needs of the trainees ; • certain components of cross-cultural competence cannot easily be taught; • And certain individuals may have an aptitude for developing cross-cultural competence whereas others do not.

18. Building competence versus Contracting competence • not all competences - particularly those relating to the exercising of judgment in a climate of uncertainty - are contractible; • a complete market for all entrepreneurial and managerial skills is impossible in principle; • compared with goods and other services, information and knowledge cannot be so readily `bought as required‘; • we do not know the value and nature of information until after it is purchased; • uncertainty and ignorance create the ``necessity of acting upon opinion rather than knowledge'‘; • the purchase or allocation of competence itself require competence

19. Competence monitoring • to develop a valid, reliable measure of CC that would serve several practical purposes: • it could be used as a selection tool for IB positions • it could be used as a diagnostic tool, to determine areas of strengths and weaknesses in an individual’s cross-cultural repertoire • to screen applicants for certain IB positions, identifying areas in which further cross-cultural training is needed. • for expatriate performance appraisals • Latent construct of cultural intelligence can be used for a measure of CC.

20. Latent construct of cultural intelligence • the cognitive skills that allow him/her to function effectively in a new culture; • the motivational impetus to adapt to a different cultural environment; • the ability to engage in adaptive behaviors.

21. Literature • Johnson, Lenartowicz and Apud (2006) Cross-cultural competence in international business: toward a definition and a model, Journal of International Business Studies No. 37, p.525–543 • Hodgson (1998) Competence and contract in the theory of the firm, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 35, p. 179-201; • Gary Knight and Daekwan Kim (2009) International business competence and the contemporary firm, Journal of International Business Studies, No.40, p.255-273