What Is the Intercultural? Definition, Examples and Challenges in the Workplace

The intercultural refers to interactions between people or groups from different cultures. In business, it concerns the way these differences influence communication, management, decision-making, negotiation, or attitudes toward time and hierarchy. The goal is to understand these gaps in order to collaborate more effectively and reduce misunderstandings.

It is not simply the presence of several cultures within the same company that defines the intercultural, but what happens between them: everyone interprets the same situation through the framework they were raised with, often without realizing it. UNESCO formalizes this dynamic in its convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions: an equitable interaction between multiple cultures, capable of producing, through dialogue and mutual respect, something none of them could have produced alone.

What Does the Intercultural Look Like in Practice?

A French manager leading a team based in Germany, India, and Brazil practices the intercultural every day, whether they realize it or not. In every meeting, they unknowingly adjust how they hand out speaking turns, share an opinion, or say no.

These adjustments play out on three levels:

• observable behaviors (greeting, negotiating, speaking up in meetings);
• the norms and values behind them (attitudes toward time, hierarchy, and mistakes);
• implicit assumptions, often invisible to the very people who share them

It is this last level that explains most intercultural misunderstandings in the workplace: people almost never argue over what was said, but over what they believe they understood.

Intercultural, Multicultural, Interculturality: Not to Be Confused

These three terms are often used interchangeably, even though they describe different realities. Multiculturalism describes simple coexistence: several cultures within the same space, without this implying any dialogue between them. Interculturality, meanwhile, refers to the dynamic of interaction between these cultures, while intercultural is what concretely describes a situation involving that interaction: an intercultural meeting, an intercultural skill, an intercultural misunderstanding.

A company can therefore be perfectly multicultural, with employees of ten different nationalities, without having become intercultural: it still needs to actively organize dialogue between these cultures, rather than simply letting them coexist on the same org chart.

The table below summarizes these three concepts:

Why Does the Intercultural Matter in the Workplace?

A company that invests in the intercultural reduces its operational risks and improves the performance of its international teams. The benefits show up on several levels:

• Fewer everyday misunderstandings: understanding the frameworks others use to interpret situations reduces friction in meetings, negotiations, and written exchanges
• Faster onboarding for new international employees, who find their footing within the company more quickly
• Higher-performing multicultural teams, particularly remote ones, where non-verbal cues are harder to read than in person
• Stronger international negotiations and partnerships: a misunderstanding over form can jeopardize a partnership on substance
• More successful expatriations, from departure through to return, a stage still underestimated by many companies
• A more effective DEI policy, able to account for the cultural, social, and sometimes legal realities specific to each country

These benefits are not a matter of intuition: they rest on proven frameworks that social science research has been formalizing for decades.

The Major Frameworks for Decoding a Culture

Understanding why a culture works a certain way means relying on proven frameworks rather than intuition alone. Two researchers laid the groundwork for what is known today as the intercultural.

In the 1950s, American anthropologist Edward T. Hall worked on training American diplomats headed abroad. From this came a now-classic distinction between high-context cultures and low-context cultures: in the former (Japan, the Gulf countries, part of Latin America), most of the message lives in what goes unsaid and in the relationship; in the latter (Germany, the Nordic countries, the United States), information has to be spelled out explicitly to be understood. Hall develops this distinction in his landmark book Beyond Culture (1976). This academic review of the concept offers a deeper look at its scope and its limits.

Around twenty years later, Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede led one of the largest surveys ever conducted on workplace values worldwide, at IBM. From it he drew a six-dimension model (including power distance, individualism, and uncertainty avoidance) that remains one of the most widely cited references in intercultural management. This model has since inspired numerous cultural comparison tools, including Akteos’s Nomad’ Profiler, introduced further down in this article.

These models provide reference points, but they cannot mechanically predict an individual’s behavior. Nationality is only one influence among others: career path, generation, corporate culture, personality, and context all play a role too. Cultural dimensions should therefore be used to form hypotheses, never to lock someone into a stereotype. This is precisely what distinguishes academic research from on-the-ground business support.

What Are the Main Intercultural Challenges in the Workplace?

In practice, the intercultural shows up as five broad types of friction that companies encounter without always naming them as such. This is exactly what Akteos’s support is structured around, through five areas of expertise:

• Countries and Regions: a local cultural code that gets misread (business customs, etiquette, attitudes toward contracts) can jeopardize a partnership or a negotiation abroad
• Intercultural Management: management methods that worked in a home country can backfire with an international team
• Intercultural Communication: a meeting, a negotiation, or an email can be read very differently depending on the culture of the person receiving it
• International Mobility: a poorly prepared expatriation often leads to an unanticipated culture shock, and to an equally difficult return a few years later
• DEI: a DEI policy designed solely at headquarters can run into cultural, social, and sometimes legal realities that differ sharply from one country to another

How Akteos Turns These Insights into Concrete Training

Akteos’s mission is to make these often-academic concepts accessible and directly usable in the workplace, whatever the area of expertise. This happens through three levers.

Training beforehand, rather than after the first misunderstanding, builds a shared frame of reference. The Succeeding in a Multicultural Environment course is a good entry point for employees discovering these issues for the first time.

Assessing yourself with a dedicated tool reveals cultural preferences that people don’t always suspect in themselves. Built by Akteos around ten cultural dimensions, in the continuity of Hofstede’s work, the Nomad’ Profiler makes it possible to compare one’s own reflexes with those of others, rather than discovering them in the moment.

Suspending judgment before interpreting changes everything: faced with unexpected behavior, the first question to ask isn’t “why are they doing this wrong?” but “what cultural logic might explain this behavior?”. This is a reflex that can be trained, not a personality trait: it is exactly what Akteos’s training courses work on, whatever the area of expertise.

FAQ: Common Questions About the Intercultural

The Intercultural: A Skill That Can Be Learned

Recognizing that the same silence, the same word, or the same intention can be read in two opposite ways depending on the culture of the person observing it is not about relativizing every difference. It is about rejecting the naive belief that a shared vocabulary guarantees shared understanding.

Intercultural competence begins exactly there: in the ability to suspend what feels obvious, and to consider that the other person hasn’t misunderstood the situation. They have understood a different one, following a logic just as coherent as one’s own. Making this mechanism visible, and then actionable, is what Akteos has been working on with companies for over twenty years.