The Textbook Didn’t Mention That: An Intercultural Experiential Exercise in Business Communication

Theoretical Foundation

Since 1990, in addition to its annual list of the top firms by revenue in the United States, Fortune magazine has listed 500 more companies, known as the Global 500, who in 2017 employed over 67 million people from 33 countries (Fortune, 2017, http://fortune.com/global500/). These top employers of 2017 were headquartered in numerous countries (Stoller, 2017). The Pew Research Trust cited the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis’s report that small to midsized companies also were becoming increasingly global, with the number of U.S. workers employed by foreign-owned companies in the United States rising 22% per year over an 8-year period, compared to the average of a 3.6% increase in employment in U.S.-owned firms in the United States (Bialik, 2017, para 1). Furthermore, the 2016 Wells Fargo International Business Indicator found that “87% of U.S. companies agree that international expansion is needed for long-term growth” (Wells Fargo, 2016).

No matter the product or service, the best businesses in the world are just that: world businesses. No matter their level of employment, employees need intercultural communication competency skills. The days when employees within a division share one culture are ending. Without employees who have the ability to understand and work within the framework of each other’s cultural communication, those world businesses will falter.

We have observed that many universities are including theoretical discussions and lectures on the importance of intercultural communication and intercultural competency skills, which Deardorff (2009) defined as possessing the necessary attitudes and reflective behavioral skills and using these to behave effectively and appropriately in intercultural situations. Channels of communication, so-called verbal, nonverbal, and paraverbal communication, differ from culture to culture; because of these differences, messages may be misinterpreted (Mehrabian, 1972). Studying groundwork done by Lewis (2006), Hall (1990), and Hofstede (1991) provides insight into important differences in regional communication styles. (For more details on these theories, please see Appendix A.)

However, feedback from the workplace indicates that this emphasis has not yielded more qualified students who understand the practical implications of doing international business. In fact, the U.S. National Association of Colleges and Employers 2018 Jobs Outlook Survey found, among other results, that the percentage of graduating seniors and young employees who believed that they were proficient in global/intercultural fluency was much higher than employers believed they were (Bauer-Wolff, 2018). As both teachers and researchers, we believe that part of the disconnect lies in the difference between learning about intercultural communication differences and actually experiencing those differences. To address this disconnect, we designed an exercise that immersed students in a business project simulation where they had to interact and communicate with students from another country. While we used Business and Managerial Communications courses, the assignment can be adapted to any business course.

Learning Objectives

After completing this exercise, students will be able to

Finally, as a group, they will be able to create and present both a group deliverable and individual deliverables. In the final deliverable to the instructor, the students should be able to

Running the Exercise

This activity is designed to enable students in different countries to work together in small virtual teams. Each team is asked to create a new HR policy for a new international company created by the merger or acquisition of companies from the two countries where the students are studying. We used companies from both Germany and the United States since that is where we teach, but any two countries can be used in this assignment.

The first and most important step in running this exercise is finding an international collaborator. The authors met in the United States when one was on sabbatical; however, each of us has mentioned the project at international conferences, whereupon many other instructors have asked to be included in the next running of the exercise. A notice in a professional journal or discipline newsletter asking for interested instructors from other countries could likewise reveal collaborators. ¹

The second step is to create small teams with equal representation from each country. The students receive team members’ student e-mail addresses ² and are assigned a real-life German/American business merger or acquisition. Each team is to write an aspect of the new HR policy, such as dress code, work hours, social media use while at work, employee behavior, training and development, and organizational structure.

Because we wanted to recreate a real-life business project as well as let students learn differences in interpreted instructions, the instructions given to the students were one page and purposely broad. (See Appendix B for a copy of this handout.)

The exercise takes several weeks; it appears to work best when spread out over 4 weeks, although it can be done in 3 if the students are not employed full-time. Placing the exercise in the middle of the semester seems to have greater effect than placing it at the end. However, we have no quantifiable data to support that statement, only our own impressions.

At the end of the 4 weeks of group virtual discussion and project work, each team prepares a group presentation of roughly 5 minutes that gives an overview and details of the new policy. This must be a virtual presentation that can be shared via e-mail, Slack platform, or live video–conference. Requiring students to record audio over a newer presentation platform such as Prezi or Brainshark lends currency and professionalism to the project. Learning how to use these current presentation software programs also has an added benefit: Students start to tacitly understand that in real life, detailed and current is more valuable than easy.

The presentations are given to both classes for feedback and review. The ideal way to present them is in a live transatlantic videoconference. Yet the presentations also work when they are delivered live in the classroom in only one country, with members of the team from that country present to answer questions. It has also worked in an online environment. In this setting, each presentation is posted with its own individual discussion board for questions and answers and discussion.

The students then write a five- to six-page double-spaced paper outlining what they experienced in terms of intercultural communication during the project itself. Students are graded as to how well they identified the theories as they occurred in the discussions, how well they analyzed the usefulness of each of the theories, how well they analyzed other cultural communication conflicts as they occurred, and how they applied the theories to solve these conflicts. They also may analyze their own views of the other culture both pre- and postexercise, and comment on whether those views have changed and why.

The faculty members should debrief each week’s events with their own classes. By doing so, they can head off areas of possible confusion, as in misunderstanding of word use. The students from Germany, for instance, had translated a nonoffensive German term into the term old-fashioned to describe policies that require employees to cover their tattoos at work. Some of the students in the United States found this term offensive.

After the 4 weeks, when students have turned in all their project deliverables, a final debrief is helpful for them to see their progress. While immediate, live, transatlantic feedback and debrief of the project are ideal, time scheduling constraints likely can keep that from happening. Faculty can either keep the debrief just to their own classrooms or record the debrief for discussion in the other classroom. (For further information and answers to frequently asked questions, please see Appendix C, the Teaching Note.)

Results: Cultural Expectations

Some interesting aspects should emerge in early stages of the project. For instance, students may find that the students from the other culture have different interpretations of professionalism and appropriate communication topics. They may also find differences in views of whether using social media for work communication is acceptable. Students from the United States may learn that their unconscious use of idioms, casual phrasing, and communication habits—including e-mails without salutations—is considered unprofessional and rude. Acceptable tone also may become a point of discussion. For instance, many students in the United States realized that much of their everyday business language was built on the use of humor, which could be misunderstood or hinder communication.

This exercise should also open up considerable dialogue about how each country’s culture guides the approach to certain issues. Each time we ran the assignment and exercise, the students from the United States came to realize that their view of the business world was very Anglo-centric. Be prepared for discussion of issues such as dress code and drug testing, working on weekends and beyond 5 p.m., and top-down versus participatory management. Stereotypes perpetuated by the media will need to be dispelled. One initially unanticipated result of the project was discussion of the value of being able to speak another language—a result so valuable that we introduced it to the debriefs in subsequent assignments.

Many of the students from both groups felt that they had gained invaluable experiences from the project, which would help them later in their professional careers. Once the project had been completed, student feedback from both sides of the Atlantic consistently indicated that the students felt this was one of the best projects of their entire academic careers. One student wrote in his final paper:

When an interviewer asked me if I had international experience, I could give details of practical application of my coursework. He was very interested in the project. And although I had never lived overseas or had employed international experience—which is what the job description asked for—I got the job anyway, based largely, I think, on what I had learned in this assignment.

For us, this statement was a confirmation that what the students were learning through the project had more impact that just studying the theories of multicultural communications.

Conclusion

In today’s global world, the likelihood of graduates having to work in multicultural teams is almost certain. One of the greatest challenges for teachers is making business diversity come alive in the classroom. With this project, students in both the United States and Germany learned firsthand how global business communication functions, where the pitfalls may lie, and how to overcome cultural barriers while developing imperative intercultural competencies to succeed in a global business environment.