Intercultural Effectiveness Developmental Plan Reflective Essay

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Intercultural Effectiveness
Developmental Plan Reflective
Essay
Introduction
Intercultural effectiveness skill is an essential aspect to successfully working and interacting with
people of different cultures. The following essay is a personal reflection on my weakness in
relation to working in a culturally diverse workplace and personal development plan towards
intercultural effectiveness to minimize my weakness. This will involve reflecting on my
behaviour, what I have learnt within the semester on cross cultural management and a personal
development plan to improve my intercultural effectiveness in the university and my future
career in multicultural workplace.
My weakness is being culturally insensitive. I find myself with general inability to understand
and uphold the differences that exist between people who are from different cultures. I easily
forget that I need to hold back and acknowledge the difference in values, attitudes, and beliefs
that exist between people of different cultures that undermine my intercultural effectiveness.
Being culturally insensitive increase the risk of failure to succeed as a person or the organization
in a multicultural environment (Griffith et al., 2016). For instance, I expect people even from
different culture to behave or perceive things the same way I do while on the same situation or
confronted with the same issues. I have strongly held for years that my way of doing things and
perceiving as the most decent and rational way and that it up to the other person to change and
do like me. After learning about intercultural skills, I feel ashamed about being culturally
insensitive as it limiting and disadvantaging my ability to be successful in an intercultural
environment.
Analyses of the weakness
Cross cultural insensitive has majorly been cause of lack of knowledge, awareness and not
accepting the differences that other cultures have. I lacked knowledge about cultural diversity
and how it is beneficial at both personal and organizational level. This made it impossible for me