Internalization of Student Cross-Cultural Skills

1. Internationalization and cross-cultural skills

Global business and education involve crossing borders, and the truly important borders are the ones that signify changes in cultures. Such borders are often the same as political borders but can also be quite different when there are many cultures within a nation or when culturally cohesive groups spill across political borders. Many institutions that are relevant for global business most likely vary across political borders. Thus, acquiring global business skills involves not only cross-cultural competence but also cross-national understanding of differing institutional structures.

Business globalization is driven by efficiency, profit, and growth maximizing entities that cross borders to seek less expensive inputs like raw materials, labor, technology, management know-how, and regulatory and legal environments. They also seek more profitable and higher growing markets for their outputs. Some of the fundamental forces that greatly influence the specific nature of these global business activities include demographics, technology, and the distribution of resources (Aggarwal 2011). Fundamentally, global business activity is value-creating.   These benefits of global business activity  mean that globalization has a natural tendency to grow relentlessly unless stopped. Even though it seems to have stalled since about 2008 , globalization has been growing steadily since the end of World War II.

Given the advanced state of the profit- and growth-driven globalization of business, higher education must also globalize. The internationalization of higher education is motivated by many factors. As Knight (2004) pointed out, the needs for internationalization should be understood both at the national/sector level and at the instructional level. At the country level, the rise of the global economy and service sector, as well as demographic shifts, push the needs for international and domestic labor mobility (Knight 2004). Country alliances and trade agreements allow for more open, cross-border markets for the education sector (Altbach and Knight 2007) to balance the global demand and supply of education services. At the institutional level, internationalization is motivated by factors such as increasing profit and enhancing research, competitiveness, prestige, and strategic alliances of colleges (Altbach and Knight 2007).

The specific context that stimulates internationalization may vary across different institutions in different countries at different times. However, one goal of higher education internationalization holds across all circumstances, that is to develop and provide talent that can compete globally and to enable students to work effectively within a diversity of cultures. As such, cross-cultural competence is always an essential element of the internationalization of education, including education of international business.

Culture is the programming of our minds that governs how our society expects us to react to outside stimuli. These ways of reacting and behaving are socially determined and differ for each society/culture. So, cultural understanding involves knowledge of intimate mental processes specific to a given culture. The acquisition of cross-cultural competence is a complex process. Many scholars agree that the concept should encompass not only multiple facets, such as the knowledge, skill, personality traits, etc. (Leung, Ang, and Tan 2014; Johnson, Lenartowicz, and Apud 2006, etc.), but also a process of utilizing these aspects and adapt in a cross-cultural environment (Johnson, Lenartowicz, and Apud 2006; Thomas et al. 2008). A widely adopted quantitative assessment of such competence is the cultural intelligence scale (CQ), designed to assess an individual’s capability to function and manage effectively in culturally diverse settings (Ang et al. 2007). The benefits of emphasizing cultural intelligence in business education and subsequent work adjustment, task performance, and career success are widely documented (Aggarwal and Goodell 2016; Ang et al. 2007).

Earley and Ang (2003) conceptualized cultural intelligence as comprising four dimensions: metacognitive, cognitive, motivational, and behavioral. In the business context, the metacognitive dimension refers to an individual’s level of conscious cultural awareness during cross-cultural interactions; the cognitive dimension reflects a person’s knowledge of norms, practices, and conventions in different cultures; motivational dimensions refers to a person’s capability to direct attention and energy toward dealing in situations of cross-cultural differences; and behavior dimension reflects a person’s capability of presenting appropriate verbal and nonverbal actions when interacting with people from different cultures (Ang and Inkpen 2008).

IB education has long emphasized the importance of cross-cultural competence in the success of students. Different IB programs and pedagogies are more effective in developing some dimensions than of other dimensions. For example, Crowne (2008) found that forms (e.g., study abroad) and depth of cultural exposure have varying impacts on different CQ dimensions. Even though educators and researchers have proposed many programs, pedagogies, class exercises, and extracurricular activities that can be used in the training of such competence (e.g., Engle and Nash 2016; Feng 2016), we expect these discussions to continue as new technology emerges leading to new teaching and learning formats. The ongoing changes in teaching and learning environment can bring opportunities for new ideas to enhance the training of necessary knowledge and capabilities for building students’ cross-cultural competence.

2. Introducing this issue

This issue of JTIB features a book review and three papers related to internationalization and the development of cross-culture competence. These papers enrich each other by providing different perspectives on how to develop cross-cultural competencies.

The first article, entitled “Differences in Student Offshoring Attitudes: Challenges in Teaching Offshoring” by Michael Maloni, Canan Multu, James Swaim, and Yoon Hee Kim of Kennesaw State University, presents a survey of undergraduate business students, revealing how resentment toward offshoring differs by student political views and global exposure. Furthermore, the study shows that the antecedents and consequences of such disparate offshoring attitudes also differ depending on political views, global exposure, and gender. The findings thus shed light on the range of potential student offshoring biases, indicating that educators must help students critically process the confounding benefits and detriments of offshoring. Based on the findings, the authors offer a stakeholder analysis exercise to teach diverse offshoring perspectives.

The second article, entitled “Developing Students Global Mindset: An Event-Based Approach,” by Sarath Nonis of Arkansas State University, Clint Relyea of Troy University, and Shane Hunt of Arkansas State University, discusses a pedagogical exercise to expand students’ global mind-sets and broaden their perspectives about self, others, and the world they live in. The exercise in undergraduate marketing and international business courses is innovative, engaging, impactful, and fun. Survey results and student reflections suggest that the exercise enhanced the global mind-set of students and expanded their perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge.

The third article, entitled “Using Native Advertising Approach for Knowledge Creation in Cross-Cultural Studies,” by Archana Shrivastava of the Birla Institute of Management Technology from India, investigates the impact of a student-centric, output-oriented methodology based on the principles of connectivism for knowledge creation in cross-cultural studies. The task involves the selection of native commercial advertisements in which students work in virtual teams and find cultural differences in their interpretation between the participants from three countries, India, Austria, and Russia. Findings show that the students acquired knowledge about the host countries’ cultures in a unique way and distinguished between facts and fiction through interesting interactions with one another.

Also included in this issue is a book review by Raj Aggarwal, entitled “The Broad Nature of Globalization”. In this review, Raj Aggarwal examines the content of two books on globalization: Globalization, 3^rd edition by C. Gopinath and The Handbook of Globalization 3^rd edition edited by Jonathan Michie. These two books are suggested as supplements to the traditional IB textbooks as they take a more fundamental, broader, and holistic perspectives on globalization.

We hope you enjoy reading this issue and that you find it thought-provoking – perhaps even giving you ideas to improve your own teaching. We would appreciate hearing all your comments on this issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Raj Aggarwal

Raj Aggarwal, PhD, CFA, is a Member of the Board of the Kent State University Foundation and of ERC Inc. He is also the Sullivan Professor of International Business and Finance Emeritus and the former Business Dean at the University of Akron, USA. He is a Fellow and a former VP and program chair of the Academy of International Business. He has won many awards for outstanding teaching and scholarship. He is or has been also a Board Member of corporations, mutual funds, and nonprofit organizations. He is a past editor of Financial Practice and Education, a Finance and Accounting area editor of the Journal of International Business Studies, and the current Editor of the Journal of Teaching in International Business. Raj Aggarwal is the author of numerous scholarly publications and is in the top one-third of a percent among SSRN authors ranked by downloads. He has over 8,000 Google Scholar citations with an h-index of 45, and an I-10 index of over 135.

Yinglu Wu

Yinglu Wu, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Boler College of Business, John Carroll University, USA. Her recent publications include articles in Journal of Interactive Marketing, Decision Support Systems, and Journal of Teaching in International Business. She is the Assistant Editor of the Journal of Teaching in International Business.