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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 837

Part of Session 153: Working in the City (Other abstracts in this session)

Transitioning to International Workplaces: Reflections from Global Leaders and Mobility Students on their Interactional Challenges

Authors: Spencer-Oatey, Helen; Reissner-Roubicek, Sophie; Harsch, Claudia
Submitted by: Reissner-Roubicek, Sophie (The University of Warwick, United Kingdom)

The internationalisation agenda of higher education frequently refers to the need to prepare young people to become ‘global employees’ (e.g. British Council Going Global 2012 themes; numerous university ‘vision statements’). Similarly, in the business world there is an extensive training industry devoted to helping staff become interculturally competent. Yet there is much less clarity over the skills that such programmes entail. Various conceptualisations of intercultural competence have been proposed across several disciplines (e.g. foreign languages: Byram 1997; communication studies: Chen and Starosta 2005, Gudykunst 2004; business studies: Schneider and Rarsoux 2003), all of them including communication. However, linguists have made little contribution to the conceptualisation debate, and few (if any) of the current frameworks explain clearly what the components really mean. The competencies are usually presented as decontextualised lists or descriptions of attributes (e.g. “flexibility”, “message skills”), with little or no mention of the interactional contexts in which such attributes are needed or the ways in which they are operationalised.  What is needed, therefore, is a contextualized approach that first identifies the interactional challenges that people face when transitioning to international workplaces, and then explores the interactional skills that are needed to handle these challenges. This paper reports a study that focused on the first step.

 

In-depth interviews were carried out with two sets of respondents: 30 Directors or Deputy Directors from a very large public organization with offices throughout the world and 9+ (data is still being collected) university students who had returned from a year’s work placement abroad.  The respondents were of various nationalities and each had recently transitioned to a culturally unfamiliar workplace. They were asked to reflect on their transitioning experiences and to describe any challenges they had encountered in interacting with others at work or in connection with their work. The Directors and Deputy Directors reported on the issues that they had experienced from a ‘new manager’ perspective, and the students reported on the issues they had encountered as novice employees.  In this presentation we report the challenges they experienced in relation to communication issues and relationship management, noting that these elements were often interconnected and that absence of communication was also identified as problematic. After this we consider the implications of the findings for researching workplace transitions and outline the next steps needed for developing a more contextualized understanding of intercultural interaction competence.

 

References

 

Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Chen, G.-m. & Starosta, W. J. (2005). Foundations of Intercultural Communication. 2nd edition. Lanham: University Press of America.

Gudykunst, W. B. (2004). Bridging Differences. Effective Intergroup Communication. 4th edition. London: Sage.

Schneider, S. C. & Barsoux, J.-L. (2003). Managing across Cultures. 2nd edition. London: Prentice Hall.