The Experience and Cultural Competence Development of Workers in the Multicultural Environment

Abstract

Due to the modern wave of globalization, the global mutual interaction and cultural diversity has become an urgent issue nowadays. The gradually increased numbers of foreign expatriates, international students, and new migration groups in Taiwan show that more and more foreigners came to Taiwan for either work or study, which multicultural phenomena were brought to the local job market. Multicultural issue comes with different stimulus toward work environment, along with a lot of new challenges. The gap among different languages, customs, manners, attitudes and values causes the adaptation problems that the workers in multicultural settings (for example: international enterprise managers, international certification teachers, foreigner student assistance) encounter. Although the literature exploring cross-cultural competences are numerous, most of them aimed at expatriate workers, not much focused on those who work in domestic environments but with multicultural phenomena. In order to gain more precise understanding of the development needs of multicultural competences of local employees experiencing multicultural phenomena, the study adopted Bennett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) as a theoretical base, focusing on Taiwanese workers in multicultural work environments to figure out the experiences, challenges, and multicultural competences of them. The study adopted qualitative research approach with thorough literature review; and the data was collected through semi-structured in-depth interview. Nine workers all with at least two years of practical experiences in multicultural work environments were invited as the participants of the study. Data collected was inductively analyzed with the coding techniques following the principle of grounded theory, in order to understand the current situation and also the future directions of human resource training needs and development for workers in multicultural work environment in Taiwan. At this very moment of moving forward to internationalization, by means of exploring the practical multicultural environment workers’ competences, research results of the study can provide suggestions for the development of internationalized talent pool and can also serve as the foundation of future research or the references for work environment design.