EL MUNDO hOy. GESTIÓN DE LA DIVERSIDAD. UN IMPERATIVO ...

The Assessment of Intercultural Training Efficacy...
The overall findings indicate that intentional intercultural training
is useful for expatriates and particularly important for employees who
are on their first sojourn away from home. These employees moved from
a place of polarization of «us» and «them» to an acknowledgement of
the similarities they have with those who formerly represented «other».
Such significant findings for this group of employees provide crucial
information for company and administrators of expatriation and international
relocation departments.
6.2. Implications for training
The implications of this research for training are many. It is important
to acknowledge that some of the learning objectives critical for trainees
go beyond the cognitive content. The data from this study suggest
that if intercultural effectiveness —expressed as a growth in Plasticity—
is a goal of training, we need to do much more than offer cognitive
training (language and conversation training). We need to add intercultural
effectiveness as a learning outcome for trainees in the process
of expatriation and develop a parallel training method to incorporate
opportunities for such learning.
Bennett (2008) argues that intercultural learning is more transferable
than traditional models of cross cultural study. Cultural comparative
training focuses on contact with other cultures and cultural knowledge
or content as the desired outcome, while intercultural learning emphasizes
a dynamic process toward the communication of meaning. Bennett
and Paige (personal communication, October 24, 2008) define intercultural
training as the «systematic effort to foster intercultural learning
through training design.» The implications of the research discussed in
this article point toward the importance of intercultural training for
expatriation.
The intentional intervention described in this study includes what
Goldstein (1993) refers to as the pedagogy of change, and involved a
training design intent on fostering intercultural learning. It is unclear
whether the intercultural training alone facilitates the changes found in
the intentional intervention group (Group 1) or if it was the intercultural
training plus the six months on-going expatriation experience. Yet
control conditions make it clear that intercultural training with the six
months on-going expatriation experience was a statistically significant
219