Coaching for Intercultural Competence

Coaching is a discipline whereby a client (called a coachee) utilizes the services of a coach to achieve various outcomes in a number of different contexts including developing intercultural competence; the main goal is to sustain effective communication within intercultural settings. The coachee may be a businessperson traveling to a new country, a student traveling abroad, or individuals working in their own country of origin but in a target culture different from the culture with which they identify. Coaching may be used on its own or in combination with other methods of developing intercultural competence.

This entry begins by defining the coaching process in some depth and then describes three components of intercultural competence: (1) knowledge, (2) affect, and (3) action. Next, the role of the ...