Intercultural communication competence is the ability to encode and decode meanings in matches that correspond to the meanings held in the other communicator's repository. A review of intercultural training literature shows little attention has been given to how to acquire this competence for business purposes. This paper proposes a model for learning and training. The model has five levels: (a) acknowledging diversity, (b) organizing information according to stereotypes, (c) posing questions to challenge the stereotypes, (d) analyzing communication episodes, and (e) generating "other culture" messages. The key to understanding other cultures is asking questions in an ongoing challenge to previously held signs. Five categories for inquiry are (a) Thinking and Knowing, (b) Doing and Achieving, (c) the Self, (d) Social Organization, and (e) the Universe.
Linda Beamer (Wed,) studied this question.