Enhancing Intercultural Competency: Understanding the Challenges and Solutions

Running head: JOURNAL ENTRY
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JOURNAL ENTRY 2
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Globalisation has condensed the contemporary world into a small intercultural village.
Currently, national or cultural boundaries no longer exist as individuals work and live with
people from different cultures. In the labour sector, organisations are striving to attain
multicultural competency in their human resource management actions. In spite these facts,
the reality is that national and cultural boundaries still exist in our minds. People have been
reluctant to embrace the ongoing eradication of cultural boundaries through the globalisation
effects. As highlighted in the reading materials, a significant percentage of the global
population possesses an insufficient understanding of intercultural competence.
As result of this insufficient understanding, intercultural conflicts are increasingly
becoming prevalent. According to Patel, Sooknanan, and Li (2011), most of these
intercultural conflicts emanate from ignorance and reliance on assumptions. Instead of
interacting with people from other cultures with an open mind, people rely on cultural
stereotypes as means of judging the practices of others. Consequently, the reading materials
enhanced my knowledge on why people stereotype the practices of those who are different
from them. Precisely, this stereotyping attitude emanates from the lack of intercultural
empathy. According to ABC (2016), empathy is all about what it feels to be the other person.
Sadly, humans tend to empathise with only those people who are similar to them.
Consequently, due to this biased empathy, intercultural conflicts are challenging to
contain or resolve. As ABC (2016) posits, it is natural for humans to empathise with those
people who are similar to them. However, by embracing cultural diversity, people can accept
individuals from diverse cultures. As in insisted throughout the learning materials, our
cultural differences does not make some people superior or inferior humans. As a result,
Holliday (2015) advice that we should focus on what brings us together instead of focusing