Globalization has reached every faucet of life from business relations to the internet, making cross cultural interactions inevitable.
HuffPost Business has commented on how people are acting and interacting in ways that help them negotiate multiple cultural arenas in our complex and evolving cultural hybridization business conditions.
The article points out that nowhere is the globolization process more evident than in the multinational corporation that is an ever-changing network of connections enabled by communication technologies and the mobile worker.
Julia Gluesing’s, author of the article and a business and organizational anthropologist, opinion came from observing cross culture business interactions for one year.
“As the global team members showed me, people use their immediate cultural understandings in order to make sense of their lives and in this way confirm that their cultures are bounded and knowable. At the same time and for the very same purpose of making sense of their lives, people also adopt from other cultures, therefore show cultures to be in a constant process of hybridization.“
Dr. David Matsumoto whose book Culture and Psychology is the most widely used cross cultural psychology textbook in the nation points out,
“Cultural psychology has implications to all areas of human functioning…You can always use the information that psychology and more specifically that cultural psychology has brought to you…We are all cultural animals. Studying another culture means that we come to understand our own culture that much better.“
Dr. Matsumoto, Humintell’s director, has also created IntelliCulture: a cross cultural adaptation course that teaches individuals the skills that they need to learn to be able to understand culture, where it comes from, how it influences behavior and how to overcome cultural differences and think critically when encountered with a difficult cultural situation.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3serYtrnuBM&feature=relmfu[/youtube]
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Humintell offers the ICAPS, which is the only test availablethat reliably and validly measures the psychological skills associated with successful intercultural and intracultural adjustment. This assessment tool examines an individual’s strengths and weaknesses prior to departure to maximize intercultural experiences.