A Simple but Unaware Matter: Cultivating Intercultural Communication Awareness through a Non-Formal Education of Office Personnel in Bangkok

Abstract

This study, focusing on cultivating intercultural communication awareness through a non-formal education of office personnel in Bangkok, aims to highlight the prominent influence of an Intercultural Communication (IC) training program in promoting business workers to have some extent of Intercultural Communication Competence (ICC) applied at their workplace. The concurrent mixed-method study comprised three approaches employed for collecting data. Two sets of self-reflection questions before and after the training program and the semi-structured interview were the main research instruments to assess the participants’ intercultural communication competence after the six-hour training. The data analysis and interpretation stage entailed transforming quantitative data into qualitative themes or codes, then relating them to quantitative outcomes for interpretation and integration. The findings suggested that the business workers had a low to moderate intercultural communication competence with particular areas to be developed prior to the training program. Nevertheless, the results drawn from the study concluded that the participants gained IC awareness from the six-hour training in a relatively high manner. The outcomes of this study could be used as a guideline for educational institutions to prepare graduates with intercultural communication competence ready for the labor market, along with human resource departments and corporations to equip their employees with IC assets by designing or offering training programs to enhance productivity at the workplace.