Study on Tourism Workers’ Intercultural Communication Competence

Abstract

Under the background of the development of Hainan tourism and consumption destinations to increase the reception level of international tourism in Hainan, an empirical study is carried out to investigate the intercultural communication competence of tourism workers in Hainan from cognitive, operational and affective dimensions. In this study, the cognitive dimension is reflected by the knowledge of domestic and foreign culture; the operational dimension focuses on verbal and nonverbal communication abilities; and the affective dimension is represented by emotional level, which mainly focuses on the participants’ ability to understand and appreciate another culture as well as their willingness to interact with people from other cultures. The results indicate that tourism workers’ knowledge of domestic culture is the best, followed by their emotional level, which are all above average. Next are nonverbal communication ability and knowledge of foreign culture, both of which are below average. Their verbal communication ability is the lowest among the five factors. The intercultural communication competence of Hainan tourism workers is not satisfactory. The analytical results also show that each factor among the three dimensions is positively correlated with each other.