Approaches for Developing Intercultural Competence: An Extended Learning Model With Implications From Cultural Neuroscience

In today’s workplace, organizations invest widely in intercultural training programs to develop leaders’ and employees’ abilities to function effectively overseas or in a culturally diverse work environment. However, these training programs are often perceived as ineffective or are even occasionally suspected of increasing the biases between groups from varied backgrounds. Faced with such results, the emerging field of cultural neuroscience has provided a biological perspective to explain the contradictions between training goals and outcomes. This article first discusses the prevailing training approaches and reviews recent studies in cultural neuroscience to explore neural reasons for certain cultural behaviors. It then identifies three implications from this review and presents an extended experiential learning model. Finally it provides three suggestions for intercultural training design.