Effects of an Intercultural Management Course on Students' Intercultural Communicative Competence Development: A Classroom-Based Study

This study combined the use of a simulated group project, self-assessments, and reflective essays and investigated their effectiveness in improving the intercultural communicative competence of Master of Business Administration students. The self-assessment data reveal that the knowledge dimension of cultural intelligence, which serves as an indirect measurement of intercultural communicative competence, exhibited greater improvement compared to the skill and metacognitive dimensions. The interviews and reflective essays not only corroborate with the quantitative findings in terms of the improvement in the knowledge dimension, but also suggest students' perceived value of this course in arousing the awareness and interests and strengthening the motivation for intercultural communication. It also reveals that the lack of work experience causes students' difficulty in relating what they learn in class to business practice. Based on these results, we argue that our approach can be effective in arousing students' awareness of intercultural communication and imparting necessary knowledge, and it can be more effective if teachers can guide students to transfer their learning to the real-world business scenarios.