ABSTRACT
Skills such as intercultural awareness, sensitivity, resilience, flexibility and openness are becoming necessary core competencies for individuals actively participating in either the global marketplace or the increasingly multicultural domestic workplace. Employees (and students) need to develop an expanded set of personal competencies to build and sustain effective relationships with their workplace colleagues. These skills are of particular urgency and importance to key managerial and technical staff on transpatriate assignments and to facilitate inpatriate inclusion.1 Individuals must prepare themselves and learn to prepare others to operate successfully in these ever more complex cross-cultural settings. This case study from the popular Star Trek: The New Generation television series is designed to address these issues and to accomplish the following general objectives:
• increase awareness of and sensitivity to the pervasive, yet largely unconscious, influence of culture on individual and group perception, thought, feeling, and behavior;
• recognize the effect of personally held cultural assumptions on communication with persons whose thoughts, perceptions, and actions are guided by a different set of assumptions;
• identify the specific skills needed to communicate and accomplish goals in a cross-cultural context; and,
• develop the process skills needed for selecting, mentoring and training others to operate effectively in cross-cultural settings.
