Page 182 - Crossing Cultural Boundaries - Cees den Teuling

ask penetrating questions about all modules” and “During the group lectures my interactions with the docents and fellow participants improved my knowledge on these modules” had no statistically significant impact on the condition of having developed the necessary skills to implement new business knowledge to respondents’ employers organisations in Russia (p = .221 and .123 respectively).
Relations with the supervisors
The reliability analysis of the statements “The foreign host company’s supervisor and I agreed on what’s important”, “The foreign host company’s supervisor and I have very similar prior experiences in business processes”, “The foreign host company’s supervisor is solving problems in a similar way”, “The foreign host company’s supervisor and I understand each other when we talk”, “The foreign host company’s supervisor and I don’t have difficult time understanding each other” was conducted the check whether the variables can be combined into one variable “attitude towards supervisor”, describing several aspects of interaction with foreign host company supervisor. The Chronbach alpa (.742) was high enough to allow such combination. As ANOVA showed the combined variable had a statistically significant effect on the improvement of respondents’ knowledge of business as a result of participating in the Presidential Programme (p = .003). The impact was positive (b = .253), which meant that better mutual understanding and interaction with foreign host company supervisor resulted increase in terms of knowledge improvement. F-ratio for the model was high enough (8.902) and therefore observed variances are not likely to be incidental.
At the same time, the attitude towards the supervisor did not determine the ability of respondents to change the way of doing things in their home-organisation as a result of participating in the Presidential Programme in a statistically significant manner (p = .619).
Difficulty in understanding foreign company supervisors’ oral communication did not have a statistically significant impact on the ability of the respondents to develop the necessary skills to implement new business knowledge in their home- organisations in Russia during their internship at the foreign host-company (p = .566) as well as on the respondents’ belief that Presidential Programme was helpful to their companies (p = .469).
The degree of easiness of communication between the foreign host company’s supervisor and the respondents had a statistically significant effect on the ability of the
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