Navigating Across Cultures: Cultural Competence Challenges for Budding Indian Managers

Abstract

The research paper attempts a reconnaissance of the challenges that Indian leaders and managers face while dealing with people from the west. For many decades now, Indian understanding of business theories and concepts has been informed primarily by western thought and philosophy. Even studies in cross-cultural communication have been received from the west, with Indian culture as the “other”. The study proposes to use the theories propounded by prominent thinkers in the field but change the foci by making Indian culture the norm and western culture the “other”. The paper also looks at the concept of cultural competence and investigates the challenges in developing it in the face of increased transience of cultural identity. And finally, it investigates the anthropological approach to cultural understanding and developing CQ - Cultural Competence by proposing theoria as a starting point to comprehend cultural differences.

Keywords: Culture, Cultural Competence, Indian Culture, Western Culture

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