What Really Matters for Carrying out Successful Cross-Cultural Exchanges: A Comparative Study of Professionals from China and the USA

Abstract

The present research provides data showing what aspects professionals in the USA and China may consider important in conducting successful cross-cultural interactions. Although the issue at hand has beenstudied previously, the inclusion of professionals as a sample is unusual, hence this study can be used as a basis for other studies which manipulate features of the inter-cultural professional and see how he/she is regarded and treated. The assumptions leading to this investigation were that Chinese professionals would differ from those from the USA in considering education as well as appearance to be more important than aspects related to attitude, which were thought to be more important for USA professionals. Results show that more Chinese professionals give greaterimportance to more aspects related to appearance than to education and attitude while professionals from the USA rated more aspects related to education and attitude as very important.Except for Sociability, English level and age, which were considered very important, Chinese respondents consider all other aspects important, while respondents from the USA have more diverse opinions (See table 2 and table 3). The Chinese respondents considered 100% of the total criteria important or very important. More respondents from the USA than from China considered more aspects to be very important. Professionals from the USA were more diverse in their opinionof the level of importance of each variable, but at the same time they show to be more cohesive as a group than the Chinese. It is important to notethat most of the variables forming the final criteria were provided by professionals from the USA, and that such criteria was more widely embraced by the Chinese as important or very important than by those from the USA.