Understanding Intercultural Competence
Understanding Culture and Intercultural Competence
Culture encompasses a group of values, beliefs, behaviors, preferences, traditions, ways of learning, communicative models and their interpretation, art, and literature. It is created, shared, and transmitted by a group of people. Culture represents socially learned traditions, ways of life, and structured ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. It serves as a society’s identity card, a way of classification, and the accumulated knowledge of that society. Cultural understanding is often founded more on convictions than on empirical knowledge, framing the behaviors of individuals as members of a society. It includes shared habits among members of a group living in a specific geographical area, influencing social relations and daily behaviors.
What is Intercultural Competence?
Intercultural competence (IC) comprises an interrelated set of cognitive, behavioral, and affective competencies. IC is the ability to behave and communicate effectively and appropriately in intercultural situations, based on one’s intercultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes. It involves:
- Knowledge of others
- Knowledge of self
- Skills to interpret and relate
- Skills to discover and/or interact
- Valuing others’ values, beliefs, and behaviors
- Relativizing one’s self
Linguistic competence plays a crucial role in intercultural competence. Essentially, intercultural competence is the capacity to adapt behavior to a cultural context.
The central goal of IC work is to help organizations achieve their intercultural goals. These include fostering more positive communication and relations across cultures, creating more inclusive environments, achieving more successful diversity recruitment and retention, and effectively incorporating diverse cultures into the organization.
The Origins of Intercultural Competence
IC began to be recognized as important when the US Government realized the Marshall Plan wasn’t working as intended. It is a fragmented field, involving various disciplines such as business, military, diplomacy, anthropology, and psychology.
Cultural Shock and Reentry Shock
Cultural shock refers to the emotional reactions to the disorientation experienced when immersed in an unfamiliar culture. It involves feelings of frustration, isolation, misunderstanding, and being left out. Reentry shock is a similar stress that arises when individuals return to their home cultures, seeking to understand their experiences, integrate their learning, and readapt. They often realize they’ve become marginal in their own culture.
E. Hall is considered the father of IC. He studied culture both as knowledge (art, literature, cinema) and as the way of living in another country. He also focused on nonverbal communication and the symbols used by Americans.
The Peace Corps Program
The Peace Corps Program sends volunteer students abroad to remote areas to interact with locals, learn the language, and understand customs. The main idea was to break the isolation of US students by training and sending them to different countries. They received the best training in languages, integration into local communities, and practical experience. Similar programs include the United Nations, Erasmus+, and Joven Cooperante. This program highlighted the importance of training to prepare volunteers for cultural immersion, reducing the impact of the “V curve” (culture shock) and the “W curve” (cultural and reentry shock). Training methods included role-plays and case studies.
Stereotypes vs. Generalizations
Stereotypes involve the automatic application of information (both positive and negative) about a country or cultural group to every individual within it. This information is often based on limited and incomplete experience. Relying solely on stereotypes can lead to significant misunderstandings.
Generalizations, on the other hand, use initial ideas about a group to form hypotheses. Generalizing acknowledges that there may be a tendency for people from a certain culture group to share certain values and behaviors. However, like stereotypes, they can be based on incomplete or false information.
Global Citizens
Global citizens perceive themselves as part of something much grander and more inclusive than a single culture or nationality.
Stages in the Adaptation Process
- Euphoria or Honeymoon: A feeling of euphoria and high mental clarity, where the frame of reference is still the culture of origin. Behavioral differences and new ways of doing things are noted, and the new culture is seen as exotic and fascinating.
- Cultural Shock: The longest stage, characterized by inadequate clarity and adaptation to the new context. This stage involves great confusion.
- Progressive Recovery from Cultural Shock: Confusion and stress decrease, language control improves, and mental clarity increases, though still relatively low.
- Adaptation: Behavior aligns with the new culture, and the mental and cultural framework of reference becomes clearer.