Measuring Competence for Global Business: In Search of Authentic Data in Japanese Business Corporations

Research on global communication competence, intercultural competence, and communicative competence relies heavily on second-hand data collected through surveys and interviews due to the limited first-hand access researchers have to naturally occurring data. This chapter reports on a case where Japanese researchers needed access to authentic critical incident scenarios for the development of a situational judgment test to be used to assess the Global Business Discourse Competence (GBDC) of Japanese business practitioners. The development of these scenarios was dependent on the collection of naturally occurring data from business interactions on job sites. However, access to such data was problematic because of the unpredictability of incidents and the strong concerns by the participant business corporations concerning the privacy and confidentiality of their people and processes. The solution was to devise a series of simulated vignettes using data from multiple sources including interviews, focus group meetings and surveys. Researchers used feedback from subject matter specialists and pre-test participants to revise the vignette scripts to ensure that they accurately represented real incidents typically taking place on job sites. This chapter raises the questions of authenticity in business discourse data and the extent to which simulations can evidence real-time communicative events in critical-incident cases.