Methodological approaches to assessing cross-cultural barriers in the activity of consulting companies

Abstract

Purpose. To substantiate a methodological approach to assessing cross-cultural barriers in the activity of consulting companies that combines the contextual, subject and project levels of measurement into a single aggregation procedure. Methods. The study applies comparative analysis of assessment instruments against a uniform set of criteria (unit of analysis, type of input data, nature of validity, vulnerabilities), typology building for the classification of barriers by their nature, level decomposition for separating the three dimensions of assessment, logical modelling for constructing the aggregation procedure, and the apparatus of fuzzy sets for substantiating the aggregation of qualitative estimates. The evidence base comprises 27 scholarly publications issued between 1988 and 2025, whose bibliographic records were verified through the Crossref registry and the DOI resolver. Results. A cross-cultural barrier is defined as a persistent decline in the effectiveness of professional interaction between a consultant and a client, caused by differences in their culturally rooted linguistic, value-based, procedural and institutional orientations. A distinction is proposed between a potential barrier as a condition and a realised barrier as an event that has already occurred within the cooperation. A five-group typology of barriers is developed, and each group is shown to correspond to its own class of measurement instruments. The comparative analysis demonstrates that country-level index methods capture only the potential barrier and are unsuitable for assessing an individual pair of participants because of averaging, symmetry and the algorithmic flaw of the composite measure; psychometric scales measure self-assessed confidence rather than competence; project indicators capture the realised barrier but do not establish its cause. A level triangulation scheme is substantiated, which combines the three dimensions into an integral score through normalisation, expert weighting and the aggregation of linguistic variables by fuzzy logic. Conclusions. No existing class of instruments measures a cross-cultural barrier directly, therefore a sound assessment is possible only through the combination of levels. The proposed scheme supports four types of managerial decisions: market selection, project team composition, the inclusion of coordination costs in service pricing, and targeted personnel training. The approach is presented as a substantiated proposal with testable limitations that requires empirical verification of construct validity and calibration of the weighting coefficients.