Navigating the Human Terrain: Development of Cross-Cultural Perspective Taking Skills

As the U.S. Army increasingly operates in multicultural environments, Army leaders at a minimum must develop relationships with the local people. Multicultural perspective-taking competencies will enable leaders to build relationships and to function effectively in multicultural environments. Multicultural perspective-taking competencies are generalizable competencies that will enable Army leaders to extract, interpret, and utilize cultural information in any culture. Recent research (Rentsch & Gundersen, 2006) has identified a set of multicultural perspective-taking competencies including self-awareness, personal and interpersonal skills, regional expertise, extraction skills, interpretation skills, and the development of cultural schema. These multicultural perspective-taking competencies were extracted from a broad search of research in cultural anthropology, psychology, international business, and adult education. Two primary objectives of the proposed effort are (1) to identify any additional multicultural perspective-taking competencies based on interviews with subject matter experts and (2) to develop a prototype training and development system for the initial acquisition of multicultural perspective-taking competencies. To conduct this project, a multidisciplinary team with expertise in intercultural communications and relations, cultural and cognitive anthropology, cross-cultural counseling, international business, training, and adult education has been assembled.