Intercultural Competence
Intercultural Competence
I was not able to partner with anyone on this so I did this exercise on my own. However, it has a certain relevance to real-life for me.
There are many things I would look for to judge intercultural competence in someone might hire. I do some consulting work with a public relations/marketing agency in Jacksonville. Since we are trying to expand our reach into the Hispanic market, there are intercultural issues that we would need to assess.
Some questions I would put to a job applicant to judge their intercultural competence would include:
• Whether they speak a second language (in other words do they linguistic knowledge)
• Whether they have traveled outside the United States and in what capacity? In other words did they live or study abroad or just pass through somewhere as a tourist. I would need to follow up with questions about what they found the most interesting and what they found the most difficult about working, living or traveling outside the United States. These answers would help me determine the candidate’s tolerance for ambiguity and their potential to empathetic or enter into modes or transpection or cross-cultural empathy.
• Regardless of whether the candidate was Hispanic, I would want to delve into their perceptions of Latin America and Hispanic or Latino culture. What I am looking for here is measures of conscious and unconscious competence and conscious or unconscious incompetence. In order words, I want to know if they consider all Hispanics one and the same or if they understand what makes a Puerto Rican distinct from say a Chilean, even though both share a common language and common heritage.
Most importantly, I seek an employee who is motivated to expand upon his or her own intercultural abilities. Martin & Nakayama are absolutely correct when they point out that motivation is key. They wrote that “if we aren’t motivated to communicate with others, it probably doesn’t matter what other skills we possess” I agree. I give an example from my own past to show what motivation can do.
When I was a young adult living in Puerto Rico, I went to work for the English-language newspaper there, The San Juan Star. Of course there were many U.S. Americans working there – some of whom had been living in Puerto Rico for more than 20 years. Very few of them spoke any Spanish and regardless of the relationship with the United States, Spanish is the lengua franca in Puerto Rico. They motivated me to NOT be like them, and I went out of my way to learn Spanish. That motivation then changed the course of my life and continues to have an impact today. So in coming back full circle to our assignment in terms of making a decision on a new hire, I would not bring anyone into our fold who did show the motivation to embrace new dimensions of intercultural communication.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home