Toward an Operational Definition of Cross-Cultural Competence from the Literature

摘要

The task documented here is part of a project to support Cultural Readiness for the Department of Defense. The purpose of this project is to derive a preliminary operational definition of cross-cultural competence and test and validate related measures in the military population. We define measurement for this purpose as establishing an understanding of the level of expertise in the target population. Cross-cultural competence (CCC) is the expertise which enables an individual in the military to perform in any number of cultures to achieve organizational goals (in contrast to more specific regional knowledge and language skills). The first part of this task, documented here, was to operationalize1 the definition of CCC by using constructs previously investigated in the literature. The second half of this task, to be documented in a subsequent report, will further develop the operational definition through the conduct of critical incident interviews conducted to examine the role of CCC within the context of mission success. Task 1 of the project, in which we identified measures of cross-cultural competence in the literature and examined their psychometric properties, addressed the first part of our conceptualization process. Here, we continue the conceptualization phase by examining the nature of existing constructs to come up with a definition of what exactly is to be measured. First and foremost in the conceptualization process, the conceptual criteria should be carefully identified to include all of the important dimensions of performance. This will involve not only theoretically based hypotheses about important constructs, but also detailed explication of what performance success looks like that can be tied to the important and relevant outcomes of mission effectiveness.