Intercultural competence in the international business arena

Intercultural competence

Edited by Michael J. Morley and Jean-Luc Cerdin

Introduction

The increasing pace of internationalization and the changing forms of globalization, coupled with the changing contours of foreign direct investment location decisions in the global economy, make the landscape of international business more complex than ever. A range of topics of fascinating possibility and equally exceptional problems including, but not limited to world trade, intellectual property, migration, wealth distribution, technological spread, ecological degradation and social responsibility are exercising the minds of academics, practitioners, policy makers and political leaders. From a practical perspective, these developments and attendant forces, in combination, mean that the intercultural encounter, in all its guises, is becoming an increasingly common experience in a grater array of workplaces and work settings in an ever-increasing number of countries and regions.

In the international business arena, intercultural competence, at the individual level, in the form of personal attributes, knowledge and skills, is presumed to be associated with global career success, and, at the organizational level, with business success through the more effective management of business operations in this increasingly diverse range of host locations. Yet, the cumulative evidence on these fronts from the international, comparative and cross-cultural literatures remains mixed. Conceptual and definitional challenges are commonplace, the path to its development remains uncertain and its resultant impact is, at best, somewhat variable. This special issue of the Journal of Managerial Psychology seeks to cast further light on the multifaceted nature of intercultural competence in the international business arena and, through a series of both conceptual and empirical papers, furthers our knowledge of its relationship with aspects of personal, managerial and organizational effectiveness.

Setting the scene

Operating across national boundaries has always brought with it a bewildering variety of cultural and institutional specificities that make managing in this context especially complex with the result that, as [17] Torbiorn (1982) put it, many thousands of words have been devoted to the subject of the ideal candidate for overseas assignments and their associated complexity. As a potential response to this complexity, the notion of developing a cross cultural fluency, and an appreciation and acceptance of difference has a long pedigree in several streams of literature and much has been claimed for it in terms of enhancing ones...