Assessing intercultural training designs

Abstract

Training designs are critical to the success of intercultural training programmes. A common typology for classifying intercultural training designs distinguishes among the following dimensions: experiential discovery versus didactic expository and culture‐specific versus culture‐general training. The purpose of this paper is to assess different intercultural training designs referring to this typology. First, a concept of intercultural competence is developed. Based on this concept experiential training designs are favoured as they allow to train the cognitive, affective and behavioural component of intercultural competencies. In the second part of the paper an empirical study in the USA and Germany is conducted in order to assess whether the degree of intercultural competencies differs between the two nations. As no considerable differences can be identified the benefit of culture‐general training is discussed. Significant skills to be focused on in intercultural training are described and specific measures for pre‐assessment devices in intercultural training are presented.