• STRATCH offers a training that stimulates intercultural effectiveness. Does your work also bring you into contact with people from different cultures? And do you want to more effective in that?
• Does your organisation employ people with different cultural backgrounds? And do you want to increase the quality of their cooperation?
• Do you have employees or colleagues that have to work within a multicultural context or who will go abroad for a shorter or longer period of time? Do you want to prepare them optimally?

STRATCH provides a training that can help you with realising these goals: the Intercultural Effectiveness Training (IET).

Most intercultural trainings are aimed at educating on specific cultures. In our fast changing world, this knowledge can become outdated, and even lead to stereotyping. IET is focused on improving competences and learning to use these effectively to communicate and cooperate with people from other cultures in an effective manner.

Scientific research has shown that five competences help us to be effective in contact with people from other cultures or in a different cultural environment:

1. Cultural empathy: the ability to empathize with the feelings, thoughts, and conducts of people with a different cultural background.
2. Open attitude (open-mindedness): an open and unprejudiced attitude towards other groups and other cultural standards and values.
3. Social initiative: the tendency to go out in another culture or in a multicultural setting.
4. Emotional stability: the tendency to remain calm in stressful situations.
5. Flexibility: the ability to adjust behaviour to different situations.

The IET focuses on the first three of these five competences: cultural empathy, open-mindedness, and social initiative. Emotional stability and flexibility are less trainable.

The goal of the IET is:

• To offer knowledge and insight into these three intercultural competences in a practical way and to be able to use them in an effective way.
• Increasing the ability of professionals, managers, and executives to solve intercultural problems.
• Learning intercultural effectiveness, independent of specific knowledge of other cultures.
• Contributing to a healthy social and working climate.

The IET takes place in at least two and at most four mornings or afternoons and is supported by an interactive computer program. In that program, 28 real-life situations are shown with four possible responses for each situation. The judgement and choice of responses by the trainee will result in personal feedback with scores on the competences and on the effective use of these competences. With that, the trainee can determine on which points he/she wants to improve. With theory, role-play, and case discussions, the competences can be improved.

The IET has been developed by prof. Dr. Jan Pieter van Oudenhoven, cross-cultural psychologist at the University of Groningen.

Interested? Send an e-mail to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .