| Cultural diversity in workgroups is recognized both as strategic strength as well as potential conflict source. The diversity brings along a wide range of ideas resulted from various thinking framework and working manner, leading to highly creative group performances and group synergy. Unfortunately, cultural diversity in a workgroup also means that the group members are coming from various cultural perspectives leading to the fact that they possess different pattern in perceiving ideas and communicating thoughts. Therefore, previous studies commonly agree that communication is one of the main problematic areas in intercultural workgroups. The intercultural group management strategies are believed as the crucial challenges for target accomplishments. Following the line of thought, this study focuses on an issue of group diversity management, namely the idea of mediating person. A mediating person is an individual who facilitates communication, understanding and action between culturally different persons of a workgroup (Bochner, 1981). This study is based on a previous work exploring characteristics of the mediating person based on a field interview with 23 Indonesian and German practitioners involved in Indonesian-German workgroups. Several qualities were identified as closely related to the role of mediating person. They are: outspoken, self-confident, critical, independent in their thinking style, yet polite. Continuing the previous work, this study attempts to identify competencies of a mediating person. An intercultural film depicting the role of a mediating person in an Indonesian-German workgroup was presented to 23 postgraduate psychology students, followed by an open-ended questionnaire to identify the competencies. A content-analysis technique was applied to analyze the data. The result is seven competencies of a mediating person which covers personality (harmonious drive, strong cultural identity), aptitude (perspective switching), skill (communication, cultural empathy), knowledge (cultural perspectives), and behavior (behavior modification). |