Developing Intercultural Competences

• Introduction, sharing of (inter)cultural issues and challenges in the participants’ workplaces
• Understanding the concept of culture
• Becoming culturally competent in the business world
• Cultural strategy workshop (How to develop strategies that respond to cultural tensions and changes)

• Intercultural competence in today’s globalized world
• What is a global leader and how can global leaders be developed?
• Assessment of intercultural competence and reflection on these scores
• First step towards developing intercultural competence through several activities

• Expatriation as developmental experience
• Other ways of developing intercultural competence
• Continuation of developing intercultural competences through debrief of homework exercises and new activities.

Day 4: In depth explorations

Three to four different themes with problem solving team exercises will be offered, each of which address a specific real-life problem area related to culture and divergent ways of doing things. These may represent areas within virtual teams, organizational diversity, transnationalism, intercultural negotiations, challenges in marketing, sales and communication. The first part of the day is to analyze and identify the problem and develop alternative solution models by employing suitable theoretical and experiential knowledge. The second part of the day is presenting and discussing the proposed solution to other teams. Peer-group assessment focuses on the pros and cons of the proposed approaches. Further improvements and constructive criticism are discussed across teams, while best practices are selected together. A common discussion on learning take-aways concludes the day.

• Demonstrate knowledge about the theories and concepts underlying culture, intercultural competence, global leadership and expatriate management
• Demonstrate awareness of the challenges posed by globalization for the business context, especially in terms of global leadership, development of intercultural competences, and developing strategies that respond to cultural tensions and changes.

Demonstrate skills in such a way that they are able to:

• Identify interculturally sensitive situations in a professional context and adequately respond to such a situation
• Formulate appropriate action plans or strategies, for example for global leadership development
• Analyse and critically reflect on cases where specific problems arise in terms of the core topics of this course, and apply the acquired knowledge to design potential solutions

Demonstrate competence in such a way that they are able to:

• Reflect on one’s own and others’ culture, one’s intercultural competence, and one’s own experience in intercultural contact

• The course draws on a selection of journal articles and book chapters that represent recent relevant research within culture, intercultural competence, global leadership and expatriate management.
• The final literature is announced in the reading plan that will be available in August at the latest.