1. Erika Vaiginiene Erika.vaiginiene@ef.vu.lt Vilnius University Lithuania

2. Competence is on of the most important factors that may explain firms existence, boundaries, structure and development at all.

3. Synonyms of “Trans-cultural competence” Intercultural competence International competence Global competence

4. Cross-cultural competence the ability of individuals to function effectively in another culture; a set of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, agency, or among professionals and enables that system, agency, or those professionals to work effectively in cross-cultural situations; is an individual’s effectiveness in drawing upon a set of knowledge, skills, and personal attributes in order to work successfully with people from different national cultural backgrounds at home or abroad.

5. Prerequisites for cross-cultural competence In order to be culturally competent, an individual would have to: ( 1) possess a strong personal identity; (2) have knowledge of and facility with the beliefs and values of the culture; (3) display sensitivity to the affective processes of the culture; (4) communicate clearly in the language of the given cultural group; (5) perform specially sanctioned behavior; (6) maintain active social relations within the cultural group; (7) negotiate the institutional structures of that culture. Individual’s ability to step outside his/her cultural boundary, to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange, and to act on that change of perspective. Individual must have the motivation to use the knowledge available.

6. Personal competence (Johnson, Lenartowicz and Apud, 2006)

7. Personal attributes Values; Beliefs, norms Personal characteristics Unconstrained curiosity Flexibility; Decisiveness; Perseverance; Sincerity; Duality Perception Self-Efficacy, etc…

8. Personal skills The Oxford Dictionary defines skill as ‘expertness, or practiced facility in doing something’; It is the behavioral component of CC, and includes abilities and aptitudes; Important abilities for CCs: foreign language competence, adapting to the behavioral norms of a different cultural environment, effective stress-management, or conflict resolution.

9. Cultural knowledge - has a positive effect on other [cross-cultural competence] attributes and maximizes intercultural competency.

10. Culture-general knowledge a focus on awareness and knowledge of cultural differences. includes an examination of the participant’s own mental makeup and how it differs from that of others. applies to any cultural environment; deals less with how to live in any specific culture and instead focuses on how to work effectively in a cross-cultural environment. includes the components of culture, how cultural values are learned, and frameworks for understanding and comparing/contrasting different cultures. a general knowledge of the complex environment in which international business operates, within the different economic, political, legal, social, financial and technological systems that co-exist.

11. Culture-specific knowledge focus on specific knowledge about another culture; includes information about geography, economics, politics, law, history, customs, hygiene, what to do, and what not to do – but spends little time on the participants’ own cultural introspection. includes learning the language of the culture, although the ability to communicate effectively in the foreign language is more properly categorized as a skill.

12. A model of cross-cultural competence in international business (Johnson, Lenartowicz and Apud, 2006)

13. Institutional ethnocentrism Appointment of home country nationals to key executive positions in overseas affiliates; Imposing of “the ways of working” at the headquarters in the home culture on affiliates abroad ; Promotes the home culture’s ways of doing things; The extent to which institutional ethnocentrism affects the operations of a foreign subsidiary depends on the tightness of the organizational culture; Can impair the expatriate employees’ ability to work effectively with other national groups

14. Cultural distance overall difference in national culture between the home country and affiliates overseas. as the cultural distance increases, the difficulties facing business processes overseas also increase; reflects not only difference in cultural values, but also in other environmental variables, too, such as the language, the economy, and the political and legal systems.

15. Cross-Cultural Competence in International Business (Johnson, Lenartowicz and Apud, 2006)

16. Competence building International trips; Experience of work in a global team; International training; Foreign assignments.

17. Impediments for International training many cultural training programs fail because they tend to put too much emphasis on culture-specific knowledge ‘at the expense of a more general learning principle’; training programs do not meet the needs of the trainees ; certain components of cross-cultural competence cannot easily be taught; And certain individuals may have an aptitude for developing cross-cultural competence whereas others do not.

18. Building competence versus Contracting competence not all competences - particularly those relating to the exercising of judgment in a climate of uncertainty - are contractible; a complete market for all entrepreneurial and managerial skills is impossible in principle; compared with goods and other services, information and knowledge cannot be so readily `bought as required‘; we do not know the value and nature of information until after it is purchased; uncertainty and ignorance create the ``necessity of acting upon opinion rather than knowledge'‘; the purchase or allocation of competence itself require competence

19. Competence monitoring to develop a valid, reliable measure of CC that would serve several practical purposes: it could be used as a selection tool for IB positions it could be used as a diagnostic tool, to determine areas of strengths and weaknesses in an individual’s cross-cultural repertoire to screen applicants for certain IB positions, identifying areas in which further cross-cultural training is needed. for expatriate performance appraisals Latent construct of cultural intelligence can be used for a measure of CC.

20. Latent construct of cultural intelligence the cognitive skills that allow him/her to function effectively in a new culture; the motivational impetus to adapt to a different cultural environment; the ability to engage in adaptive behaviors.

21. Literature Johnson, Lenartowicz and Apud (2006) Cross-cultural competence in international business: toward a definition and a model, Journal of International Business Studies No. 37, p.525–543 Hodgson (1998) Competence and contract in the theory of the firm, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 35, p. 179-201; Gary Knight and Daekwan Kim (2009) International business competence and the contemporary firm, Journal of International Business Studies, No.40, p.255-273