Hello everybody,
here you find an article from the New York times, talking about doing international business and the intercultural skills needed for that:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/business/global/22chinatrain.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1349807443-WWmX2LaZBm9jnFN7ZzMcVw
Have you experienced any intercultural problems before when cooperating with people from other countries? Do you think that intercultural training should be a "must" for every employee of international companies?
Please feel free to share your thoughts!
I have already worked for an international company and had to face some intercultural problems. One of the most important problems was the working attitude of the employees from the different countries, like one of them did not really take the work serious, whereas the others really tried to give all for their work, to finish the tasks in an excellent way and for sure in time.
ReplyDeleteAs I have experienced the working attitude is not the same in every country therefore I think an intercultural training would be a great solution for huge international companies to make all employees at least think about their working attitute and I think that it really would help some companies to improve their work.
I absolutely agree with Eva on this issue. I experienced this in a Spanish subsidiary of an Austrian company, where employees had trouble with dealing with each other, due to different work attitudes. For this reason, I think intercultural training should be made a regular component of training, especially for new employees.
ReplyDeleteHaving been in Korea for a semester and having many foreign friends, I know how different (also seemingly different) cultures can be. Just yesterday I was sitting with my Korean exchange students’ friends together for dinner. They started to shyly ask me what a situation ment that happened to them in a class that day.
ReplyDeleteThe Korean guy was sneezing and two girls in front of them turned around to say bless you and offered a tissue. They were shocked and thought that It was impolite of him to sneeze and they kind of made a joke by saying something to him. However, the girls with their Austrian culture background were just acting politely especially by offering a tissue.
I think a small incidence, like this you can already see how important it is to give people inside views on different cultures. I think it is the perfect example to show how important intercultural training is.