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Discussion and conclusion

Both cases, presented in the Appendices, might be discussed in the light of narrators’ intercultural competency. The first case deals with the problem of reflection on a compliment in a multicultural context while the second case is devoted to the problem of written communication in a multicultural team. Cases include participants from Europe and East Asia. One is written by the researcher, another – by the researcher’s friend.

In the framework of ‘Knowledge and ideas’ cluster, the narrators’ reflection on the critical incidents may be considered as a first step towards gathering information about rules of interaction in an intercultural setting. Since both girls experienced frustration due to unexpected cross-cultural misunderstanding and, even after discussing the issue with a buddy, found the whole situation ‘weird’, one can say that their demonstrated personal qualities, in particular self-awareness, acceptance and flexibility, have a room for improvement. Furthermore, despite showing quite good relationships competency, including attempts to welcome strangers and build rapports, the girls seem to have different understanding of interpersonal attentiveness with their dialogue partners. That is why, trying to be friendly they unconsciously threatened faces of the partners: either through making inappropriate from partners’ point of view compliments or using impolite written communication style. Interestingly, both stories cover rather negative experience and demonstrate important learning outcomes through self-reflection and discussion issues with buddies.

It might be hard to judge, if the girls might be regarded as globally competent people according to the GPC framework. The reason of the difficulty may lay in (1) setting, (2) cultural background, (3) subjectivity factor. As for context, including both setting and culture, the girls acted in an unfamiliar unofficial environment with people from drastically different cultural background. And it might have an impact on their choice of behavior and communication style: highly likely they would act differently in more official settings doing advance research on potential partners’ cultural differences. In addition, if girls did not seem to interact effectively in those particular bilateral cases (Germany-China, Russia-China), it does not mean that they can not interact well with representatives of other cultures. Furthermore, their frustration might not indicate unwillingness to be open to new thinking, but, in contrary, may demonstrate the potential to develop their person skills through coping with unusual interaction performance.

All in all, the discussed above critical incidents show that there might be no universal way of being interculturally competent across all circumstances while any dimension alone is not enough to ensure competency. That is why, an intercultural competency framework, like the GPC, may need to take into consideration a context factor and focus more on the meaning and importance of the knowledge factor. In addition, the politeness factor, including communication, face and humour dimensions, seems to be worth developing in future studies. Along with, the discussed above Global People Competency Framework maybe practically applied not only for social science studies, but also for HR and management providing both employers and employees with a mindmap of skills useful for effective performance in a multicultural team.