Leading by example - Developing cultural self-awareness of university staff through transformative training

Abstract

The focus of this study is twofold. First, it explores how a 1-year training programme –inspired by transformative learning - fostered the development of intercultural competences among university staff members at the international business school in the Netherlands. Second, it examines in what way an increased awareness of one’s own cultural identity (metacognitive CQ) affects staff’s understanding of how culture affects the way they operate in a culturally-diverse, international work environment. Participants’ intercultural competence development was measured and monitored via the standardized Global Mind Monitor (GMM) test instrument and explored in a series of focus groups. We found a significant main effect of the training programme for one construct (metacognitive CQ) and a marginally significant effect for two more constructs (behaviour and cultural empathy). Interaction effects showed that the training had a larger effect on management and support staff on these three constructs - two groups that were significantly outperformed by the lecturer cohort in the baseline measurement. In the qualitative part of the study we found - consistent with the quantitative results - that cohorts who scored high on the baseline measurement of the ethnocentrism scale reported becoming more aware of their own cultural identity and how this can be an impediment to acting effectively in a diverse environment. At the same time, we found that cohorts who scored high in terms of ethnocentrism in both the pre and post-tests of the GMM, focused predominantly on the significance of culture-specific knowledge – cognitive CQ – while cohorts that scored lower in terms of ethnocentrism after the training, shifted their attention from cognitive CQ to metacognitive CQ and thus focused on the importance of questioning one own’s cultural assumptions and adjusting one’s cultural knowledge when engaging in intercultural environments. The results of this study add to the literature in that they show that transformative learning methods can help enhance cultural self-awareness among university staff, which in turn has the potential to boosts the effectiveness of international classroom didactics.