| This study was designed to determine the intercultural communication skills needed to meet entry-level employment requirements for administrative support, sales, and marketing positions with corporations dealing in international business. A secondary purpose was to identify specific topics in the area of intercultural communication which should be incorporated into the two-year post-secondary business curriculum. Specific questions focused on the desired knowledges or skills in the area of intercultural communication, the degree to which new hires exhibit these skills, the programs and facilities used by international corporations to train/educate employees in intercultural business communication, the delivery methods that are most effective in providing communication training, and the importance of various topics in the area of intercultural communication in an international business environment.;To provide the necessary background for this study, four major areas in the literature were examined: internationalism/multinationalism, culture, communication and nonverbal communication theory, and intercultural communication and its implications for the business curriculum.;A survey instrument was sent to personnel managers in 100 randomly selected Fortune 500 corporations. A response rate of 61 percent was obtained with 45 percent usable returns.;Conclusions drawn from the findings of this investigation include: (1) While the distribution of corporations classified as having an ethnocentric, polycentric, or geocentric orientation were relatively equal, comments seem to indicate that corporations are moving toward a more geocentric, or global, orientation in the hiring of personnel. (2) Communication skills, especially in the areas of composition, speech, interpersonal communication, and human relations, are important to personnel selection. (3) Foreign language competence, in a majority of cases, received a neutral response across corporate classifications. This finding tends to contradict the current trend in post-secondary education towards increased emphasis on foreign language studies. (4) A majority of respondents did not believe that competence in intercultural communication was essential prior to employment. However, a majority of the corporations provided intercultural communication training following employment with independent trainers and/or in-house trainers providing this instruction typically in a seminar or workshop format. |
