ASSESSING INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE IN INTERNATIONAL LEADERSHIP COURSES: Developing the Global Leader

Abstract

The leaders of the future will have to lead with intercultural competence and with the ability to facilitate this development of competence in others. The development of skills in undergraduate students to meet this challenge is paramount to the establishment of effective leadership for the future. Within this study, researchers address the challenge by quantitatively examining intercultural competency outcomes students derive from leadership-based study abroad experiences. For five years, researchers utilized a pre-post intercultural competency survey of student participants in a leadership education study abroad program in Zambia, Africa.Using the Intercultural Effectiveness Scale (IES), data was analyzed for seventy-eight students who participated in this five-week study abroad course. The results demonstrate statistically significant growth on students' intercultural competency across all ten measures of dimensions and sub-scales. Recommendations provide a framework for leadership educators to employ pedagogies that influence intercultural development within study abroad as a means of developing global leadership in their students.

Summer study abroad in Japan: Maximizing intercultural competency development through self‐guided cultural exploration and reflection tasks

“…Most of the IES dimensions overlap with the key dimensions revealed by the study of Matveev and Merz (2014), such as culture specific knowledge, attitude, open-mindedness/ flexibility, and motivation. The IES has been tested with thousands of respondents around the world and used in diverse SA contexts, such as India (Richards & Doorenbos, 2016), Indonesia and Romania (Bell et al, 2017), Ghana, France, China, Italy, and so forth (Nguyen, 2017), rural Africa (Armstrong, 2020) and as an assessment tool for campus wide internationalization efforts (Cartwright et al, 2021). 1 The IES consists of six dimensions: self-awareness, exploration, world orientation, relationship development, positive regard, and emotional resilience.…”

Cultural Competence in Healthcare Leadership Education and Development

“…Similarly, the attempt to embed EDI within the infrastructure of the curriculum is congruent with the 'active design' that much literature suggests is the hallmark of a culturally competent system [2,39]. The fact that NHSLA programmes place emphasis and importance on both reflection and reflexivity to contribute to this space or environment is parallel with the idea of developmental processes, challenging but involving practitioners to explore their own biases, preferences and motivators [2]; intercultural sensitivity, for example, engages attitudes, perceptions, values and the motivation to adapt, and cultural intelligence engages the ability to adapt to different cultural paradigms, using not just knowledge but socially adaptive skills [10,18,27,40]. A critique, however, can be noted around risks or sensitivities-excellent and skilled facilitation is needed to create safe spaces for both the individual and group exploration of issues around power, equality, inclusion and cultural competence.…”

“…Again, the relationship between education and practice becomes prominent, as modelling cultural competence and comfort with discomfort is a critical step in helping those with whom educators work to do the same. It is also worth noting that the complexities around the issues at hand effectively assess what makes a culturally competent practitioner or leader difficult to achieve [3,7,10,20]; it is up to those who commission and design such programmes to make decisions regarding the relative importance of that. Clearly, knowledge can be meaningfully assessed, but it is harder to achieve that with regard to attitudes.…”

“…Each of these aspects has its own definitions and debates, with all adding to both the complexity and richness around these issues. Of particular relevance to this paper are the links to the domains of healthcare, where "cultural competence and cultural humility have been recommended as approaches to work with and serve diverse populations to address health disparities and increase health equity" [8] (p. 840); as well as connections to leadership, with the notion that intercultural competence can help leaders to overcome ethnocentrism [10] and generally improve leadership practice [11,12]. These ideas will run throughout this paper.…”

Linking Positive Psychology and Intercultural Competence by Movies: Evidence From Brunei and Romania

“…The theoretical basis of intercultural competence is grounded in the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) ( Bennett, 1986 ). The developmental model proposed by the theoretical perspective of intercultural competence has its main directions the acquisition by individuals of a global, international perspective of identity and the development of harmonious relationships with people from different cultures ( Armstrong, 2020 ). A high level of development of this competence allows the individual to select appropriate behavior, be more empathetic ( Meleady et al, 2020 ), minimize prejudice, and ethnocentrism ( Gregersen-Hermans, 2017 ), have a higher level of tolerance for ambiguity ( Romijn et al, 2021 ), manage stress more easily ( Schwarzenthal et al, 2020 ), and communicate easily in cross-cultural environments ( Stier, 2009 ).…”