Intercultural Competence

What intercultural competence is

Intercultural competence is a person’s ability to work effectively with people whose norms differ from their own in communication, in dealing with authority, in handling time and in handling disagreement. It is usually described as having three components: knowledge that norms differ, an attitude that accepts one’s own norm as one norm among several rather than the standard, and behavioural skill that shows in what the person actually does.

The third component is the one that can be measured, and it is the one that gets neglected. Most of what is produced under this heading addresses the first two, yet the gap between knowing that norms differ and acting accordingly is the gap that matters.

Why it matters in the Saudi workplace

In the Kingdom the question is operational, not theoretical. The workforce brings many nationalities together in a single organisation and often in a single team. In many organisations the manager comes from one country and the people they manage from two or three others, and the working language between them is nobody’s first language.

As a result, weak intercultural competence rarely shows up as open conflict. It shows up as work done to a different purpose than the one intended, a deadline understood differently from what was meant, and a mistake that reached the person able to fix it too late. These signs are usually attributed to poor performance or a poor procedure, while the cause lies elsewhere.

There is a second feature. The difference here is not between the organisation and someone breaking its rules. It is between two people working together, each doing what they believe is right. Nobody in the exchange needs correcting, which is why instructions have little effect: an instruction addresses someone who is breaking a rule, and here nobody knows they are departing from anything.

Four axes on which norms differ

Rather than talking about “cultures” in general, it is more useful to name the specific places where a difference in norms has an effect on work. Each axis has two ends, and neither end is right while the other is wrong:

• How openly objections are voiced. In one norm an objection is raised to the person’s face and in the meeting. In another it is raised afterwards, and to someone who will pass it on, because saying it openly is read as embarrassing the other person rather than as disagreeing. A manager who reads silence as agreement in the second case believes consensus has been reached when the objection simply has not been heard yet.
• What “yes” means. In one setting it confirms the content; in another it confirms only that the words were heard. The question “Is that clear?” gets a yes in both cases, so it cannot tell them apart.
• How a deadline is treated. Some norms read a deadline as a commitment that is not broken; others read it as an estimate to be revisited when circumstances change. A manager who assumes one meaning without stating it creates a disagreement that nobody knows is happening.
• Distance from authority. That is, whether a more senior person can be asked, in front of others, why they decided as they did. This connects directly to psychological safety, one sign of whose absence is that objections come only from the most senior person in the room. The difference is that psychological safety describes the state of a team, while this describes a norm a person brought with them. The remedies differ too: the first is built by how a manager reacts to the first piece of bad news, while the second needs, before that, an explicit statement that questions are expected, not merely tolerated.

Why a course on “national characteristics” does not produce it

The most common thing done in this area is a session presenting average traits for each nationality. It usually does net harm, and the reason is arithmetical, not cultural.

A trait presented this way is an average for a group, and the spread within any one group is far wider than the difference between two group averages. An average can describe a condition that no individual in the group actually lives, and the usual remedy is to show the distribution rather than the average alone. In a course of this kind there is no distribution to show, so the average is all that remains.

The effect is that participants leave with a judgement already formed about everyone they meet from that nationality, and become more confident in a reading that is no more accurate. That is the mechanism of overconfidence bias, and it also resembles implicit bias, a judgement that precedes observation because of membership of a group. The difference is that this judgement was acquired in a training room, under the name of cultural awareness.

What can actually be built: observable behaviour, not declared awareness

None of this means leaving the matter alone. It means moving the work from the first component to the third, to specific behaviours that can be taught and observed:

• Ask for a restatement instead of asking about clarity. Instead of “Is that clear?”, say “Tell me how you will start.” The first gets a yes under every norm; the second reveals understanding, or its absence, immediately.
• Ask for objections one to one before asking in the meeting, where voicing them publicly is costly under someone’s norm.
• Write down what was agreed after the meeting, not during it, and send it to everyone who attended. Writing surfaces a different understanding without embarrassing anyone.
• State the norm instead of assuming it is known: that a deadline here is a commitment rather than an estimate, and that an objection here is wanted and is not held against the person raising it. Most friction in this area is not a disagreement about norms; it is not knowing that two norms are in play.
• Ask why something is late before calling it a failure. Between the two there is a third possibility: that what was meant as a final deadline was understood as a revisable estimate. A question uncovers it in a minute; a label closes it off and lets it recur.

What unites these behaviours is that they bring an assumption into the open. Each replaces an assumption in one person’s head with a question or a written sentence. That is why they can be learned, observed and assessed, unlike “awareness”, which cannot be seen and whose attainment cannot be known.

The first place for this kind of explicit statement is employee onboarding. A new joiner learns an organisation’s culture by observation in the first weeks rather than from documents. That is true, and something should be added to it: observation itself is read through the observer’s own norm. Someone who sees a meeting with no objections reads it as agreement if that is their norm, and as fear if their norm is different, and the scene is the same.

Where it touches HR processes

• The interview. The same question does not produce the same answer across norms. A candidate who presents an achievement as “we”, in a norm where claiming work for oneself is frowned upon, is not telling you their role in it, and a candidate who says “I” is not thereby more entitled to it. A structured interview makes the questions identical; it still falls to the interviewer to follow up with a question that draws out the candidate’s own role without demanding a particular way of phrasing it.
• Performance appraisal. The way an employee describes their own work enters the rating even when nobody intends it to. This is close to the similarity pattern in rater bias, the preference for people who resemble the rater in style. The difference is that the resemblance here lies in norms of expression, not in career path.
• What gets reported. If reporting a mistake reads, under the norm of the person who sees it, as accusing a colleague, the news will not arrive however good the reporting channel is. A channel can be built by decision; an understanding of what it means to the person using it cannot.

Intercultural competence in selection

People sometimes ask how to measure it when hiring. The answer lies in the principle behind test validity: write the inference out as a full sentence before discussing any instrument. The inference “this candidate is culturally aware” cannot carry a decision. What can carry one is an inference stated as behaviour, along the lines of: someone who acts in a given way in a given situation manages a team of mixed norms with less recorded misunderstanding than a stated threshold. Producing evidence for an inference like that needs what every other inference needs, and we are not asserting that any existing instrument is sufficient for it.

Two things are absent from the description above. No specific traits are attributed to any particular culture or nationality, for the arithmetical reason already given; that is intentional, not a gap. And in the sources we reviewed we found none that estimates what misunderstandings of this kind cost organisations, so no such figure is offered. The rules on recruiting workers from abroad, and the labour rules that apply to different categories of worker, are a separate subject read from their own provisions, and nothing about them is borrowed from this concept.

Setting it apart from its neighbours

Language proficiency is a precondition rather than the thing itself. Two people can share a vocabulary completely and still differ on what “yes” means, so language is necessary and not sufficient.

Organisational culture is the set of rules of one organisation, while this concerns what individuals bring from outside it. A culture can be strong and clear and the differences on the four axes can persist, because it does not reach them. A diversity policy, for its part, is a decision about who is hired and promoted; this is a capability in the people who work with those who were hired.

Intercultural competence is not a trait a person simply has or lacks. It is built one axis at a time: someone may read unvoiced objections well and still misread how a time commitment is meant, so saying they “have it” or “lack it” describes one axis and says nothing of the others. Years of travel or long residence in a country do not supply it either. Time offers the chance to observe, but does not by itself produce the third component, and someone who spent years reading what they saw through their own norm alone has gathered evidence for a single reading and nothing more.

Related terms

• Overconfidence Bias
• Structured Interview
• Test Validity
• Employee Onboarding
• Informal Communication