The economic globalisation, the technological progress and the revolution of the information and communication technology sector have facilitated the communication among people around the world.Definition of intercultural management
The importance of intercultural management

If you agree with Elashmawi/Harris (1993, p. 1), who say that "the new world market will not only be international, but intensely intercultural", it will become obvious that the inter-national management of the future will also or even particularly make the inclusion of intercultural management an absolute necessity, Hambrick/Snow (1989, pp. 84ff) arrive at a similar conclusion and say:

"Integration and human resource management are dependent upon one another to the degree that structuring a firm's global activities involves the deployment and use of human capital and other human aspects."Intercultural management

In recent years, the intercultural management has become particularly important as the phe nomena of globalisation has been accompanied by increasing migration flows, enlargement of the European Union, economic openness of many countries around the world, the emer gence of new economies like China and the expansion of economic partnerships between countries disposing of different economic systems.The authors share the opinion that

"these new roles include international extensions of more traditional human resource management support functions such as providing country-specific knowledge of union and labour policies, legal and regulatory requirements, compensation, and benefit practises. They include preparing people for international assignments, and re-entry after those assignments are completed."While the psychology and sociology have reacted by studying the relations deriving from cultural exchanges, the economy developed a new discipline in the 1970s - the intercultural management - aimed at adapting the marketing rules to the specific cultural characteristics of a target market.This is because the communication is not linear, which means that the transmission of a message is never neutral, the spoken message trans-mits words and notions, but also norms and values and some of these norms and values may not be fully shared by the dialogue partner.(Meunier/Zaman, n.y.)

Consequently, managers have to be aware not only of the different language of the business partner but their diverging attitude, time perception, behaviours, traditions and further as-pects related to a different culture.Since then, the scope and object of study have been expanded to include the management at the level of organisations operating in a multi-cultural environment, especially for companies operating branches outside the country of origin.The need for a specific intercultural discipline in the management field comes from the fact that speaking a foreign language is not enough for a sufficient communication between peo-ple belonging to different cultures.The cooperation between these different economic systems, which are based on significant cultural differences, requires a new-in-tercultural-approach.Especially in Anglosaxon literature (Black/Mendenhall, 1990, Phatak, 1997, Teagarden Gordon, 1994, Tung, 1981), strong reference is to be found.Consequently, the intercultural management has rapidly developed the notions of mother-culture versus enterprise-culture.