Intercultural Competence Development in the Context of Diversity

Cultural diversity in the working environment causes friction which, if not managed, determines a lower level of employees' involvement, ineffective performance, poor social interaction and communication among workers from different cultures. Therefore in the enterprise an inclusive environment should be created, in which all employees feel respected, related with each other, contributing to the setting of goals and their implementation, and integration of individual experience, knowledge and perspectives occurs. In that environment, the importance of intercultural competence development becomes obvious and crucial. The authors of the article aim at revealing the special characteristics of intercultural competence development in the context of diversity. The paper consists of the following parts: first, the concepts of competence, intercultural competence and intercultural competence development are analysed. Then the design and results of the survey, which was carried out in order to examine the expression of employees' intercultural competence and methods of its development in one of the biggest service companies that has five departments in culturally different cities in Lithuania, are presented. (C) 2016 D. Lipinskiene, A. Repeckiene, K. Sciukaite. Peer-review under responsibility of Kaunas University of Technology Panevezys Faculty of Technologies and Business