Virtual Reality Technology for Developing Intercultural Leadership Competence: A Research Proposal
Mesut Akdere · The European Proceedings of Social & Behavioural Sciences · 2021
Increased globalization requires employees to develop not just technical competencies in their specific disciplines but also intercultural leadership competence, which includes a range of cognitive, affective, and behavioural skills leading to effective and appropriate communication with culturally different others. To date, Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) have demonstrated potential in their effectiveness for achieving technical learning outcomes by providing an immersive, safe learning environment that is both engaging and personalized. Yet, while learning environments such as VR and AR have created significant interest with much promise to revolutionize learning environments, the adoption of these technologies in non-technical areas is limited. Most approaches to teaching non-technical skills such as intercultural knowledge and competence do not leverage these recent educational advancements but still depend heavily on older technologies based on one-way passive learning environments, including videos and web-based platforms. Therefore, interdisciplinary comparative research in leadership development is needed to examine the effectiveness of existing and emerging learning environments (e.g., AR, VR) on cognitive (knowledge), affective (attitudes) and behavioral (skills) aspects of intercultural competence. In addition, we have identified important methodological gaps in the realm of research in leadership development field that require the field to move beyond self-report approaches by utilizing biometric data. We propose a research project to assess leadership development in an innovative research design that triangulates data from traditional quantitative pre-posttesting with qualitative analysis of learner reflections as well as with data from non-invasive biometric devices.