Does where you Come from Make a Difference in the Cross-Cultural Adjustment in Iceland?

• Main Author: Svala Guðmundsdóttir 1969-
• Other Authors: Háskóli Íslands
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: Icelandic
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: Vorráðstefna 2011; Viðskiptafræði; Iceland
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1946/8660

According to the cultural literature, societies are composed of individuals from many different culturally dissimilar countries (Hofstede, 2001; House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman & Gupta, 2004) and research has indicated that individuals differ in their effectiveness in adapting to new cultural contexts (Kim & Slocum, 2008; Peltokorpi, 2008). While the multidimensional view of adjustment has advanced, there still remain many gaps in understanding the diverse factors affecting individual adjustment to new cultures. The purpose of this paper is therefore to examine whether there is a difference in the level of adjustment in relation to individual nationality where nationality was clustered into cultural groups defined by House et al. (2004). This quantitative research made use of questionnaires that were sent to international students studying at the University of Iceland in January 2011. The results indicate that there is a significant difference between groups of nationality in relation to adjustment and that Nordic students seem to adjust better than other national groups.