Tour Guides' Intercultural Communication Competence Expectation Model And Cross-cultural Research

With the rapid economical globalization, the international tourism is developing veryfast which increase the intercultural communication behaviors. Tour guide plays animportant role as "cultural interpreter" in tourism. It is very important to do researcheson tour guide intercultural communication competence from both theoretical andpractical perspective. Based on the behavioral expectation model, this research builtthe expectation model of Tour guides' intercultural communication competence(TCC) in Chinese context, and then a cross-cultural study of Tour guides'intercultural communication competence was conducted on Chinese, American andGerman tourists.The qualitative research method group discussion was using in this research to buildthe expectation model of TCC. 62 participants are from China, Korea, and Germanand so on. Based on the group discussion data, case study and qualitative contentanalysis were conducted using Atlas software. The results show that the expectationmodel of TCC includes four dimensions. They are knowledge, communication skills,traits, and interpersonal interactions. For the knowledge dimension, it includescultural knowledge, local knowledge, emergent knowledge and procedural knowledge.For the communication skills, it includes language ability, good rhetoric, activelistening, body language and entertainment ability. The traits dimension includesextravert, conscientiousness, confidence and nice appearance. The interpersonalinteraction dimension includes leadership role, customer orientation, empathy andRenqing.A cultural sensitive questionnaire was developed based on the expectation model ofTCC which was gotten from group discussion. 249 tourists from China, America andGermany filled the questionnaire. The results show that there are significant differentamong three national cultures. The German tourists have high expectation on tourguides' knowledge dimension, the American tourists put an emphasis on the tourguides' communication skills, the Chinese tourists expect the tour guides to showgood traits. There is no significant difference on the interpersonal interactiondimension. The implication, innovation, limitation and future research were discussedin the last section.