Cornell University is making available to the hospitality industry an intercultural education exercise that was initially developed for its executive education programs and has subsequently been used in college courses and corporate training.

The “Cocktail Party Simulation” helps participants gain insights into how culture affects their own and others’ ways of thinking, communicating, and interacting in business contexts.

This report, “Developing Hospitality Managers’ Intercultural Communication Abilities: The Cocktail Party Simulation,” is available through Cornell's Center for Hospitality Research at http://hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/tools/.

The document provides full instructions so that hospitality practitioners and educators can use the simulation in corporate-level management development programs, property-level training, executive education seminars, and college courses.

According to Cornell Professor Daphne Jameson, “The hotel industry faces increasingly intercultural interactions, but few training materials have a hospitality focus, and customized training is expensive. I developed this simulation specifically for people in the hospitality industry with a goal of providing an economical method for learning how to identify and reduce cultural barriers.”

In the simulation, participants play the roles of members of the three companies, each from a different fictitious culture. At the simulated cocktail party that opens a series of important business meetings concerning a joint venture in the hospitality industry, participants establish business relationships and strive to overcome cultural differences that may impede those relationships.

The fictional cultures have enough differences among them that communication and interaction can become challenging. With those challenges, participants can use follow-up activities to translate their insights into action plans and apply these in business contexts.

In a debriefing that follows the simulation, participants examine their experience and apply it to their own professional lives. Having used the simulation many times with both practitioner and student groups.

Jameson says that participants gain new insights about the following principles of intercultural interaction:

·         Cultural values are relative, not absolute;

·         Intercultural communication involves emotional as well as rational responses;

·         Invisible cultural differences, such as values, attitudes, and beliefs, are more difficult to handle than visible differences, such as manners, customs, and rituals;

·         Deciding who adapts to whom—and how—is the greatest challenge in intercultural  interactions;

·         Cultural identity is multidimensional, involving far more than nationality alone.