The paper highlights the importance of intercultural competence (IC) in business environment, and presents outcomes of a research into the level of IC among employees of Slovak enterprises. In the contemporary business world, intercultural competence and its individual components: affective, behavioral, and cognitive competences, become an inevitable asset for enterprises, due to high globalization of virtually all corporate processes and activities. Even though the available literature on research into this cultural phenomenon reports a rather high perception of one's own IC, namely its affective component, as proved by our research, the main objective of which was to measure IC of Slovak employees, the actual level of overall IC, and especially its affective component, in Slovak enterprises is rather low. The research, the detailed description of which is the primary focus of this paper, was conducted in spring 2018 on a representative sample of Slovak employees in enterprises of all types, sizes, and fields of industry, and has proved that by increasing one of the three components of IC, the overall IC of an individual will increase. Therefore, it may be stated that training of intercultural competence has a high potential in corporate environment, and may produce great benefits for enterprises who deal with interculturality in their operations, and encounter people of other than their home culture, may it be their external or internal stakeholders. The outcomes of the research also suggest a need, and provide a platform for, both the assessment of IC of employees, and a targeted intercultural training in Slovak enterprises, which would be tailored according to the individual needs of each enterprise.

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Globalization is one of the most significant trends of the contemporary reality that needs to be accepted and adapted to the changes it brings. Human resources have always been viewed by enterprises as a significant long-term functioning capital. Along with new creative work skills, HR currently represent one of the most crucial potentials within an enterprise, enabling it to achieve competitive advantage among rivals. Thus HR serve as a source of the future success of an enterprise. People spend a substantial amount of time at work, and satisfactory working conditions are essential for their psychological well-being, as they can greatly affect both the person’s work performance and the overall quality of life. In order for an enterprise to fulfill the criteria of the contemporary globalized world, management needs to adhere to this trend not only by adjusting the organizational structure, but also by maintaining more complex interpersonal relations among employees. It is the relations that may create conditions for mobbing or psychological bullying to occur, while originating from one or more members of a team, and being directed towards other individuals. In this paper, the authors present selected results of a research related to mobbing in Slovakia, which investigated the degree of its occurrence in a workplace, its most frequent causes, and the manifestations of negative behavior. In conclusion, we propose such measures that will prevent any form of violent behavior from occurring in the workplace, and will have a positive impact on building culture of quality in an enterprise.

These days, differentiating and ecologizing of the products has been gaining more and more importance. Therefore, green logistics has earned its indisputable position in an enterprise, as an important tool ensuring competitiveness. Small and medium enterprises may achieve these goals by implementing green innovations into a product as well as into the processes in an enterprise. The main objective of this paper is to propose possibilities of implementing green innovations of products and processes in Slovak small and medium enterprises. A survey which has been carried out regarding this topic, focused on the analysis of the perception of green products by customers, and on identifying the factors which customers take into consideration when making purchase decisions related to these products. The research has been evaluated by methods of testing the statistical hypothesis (Chi-square test, Friedman test, and the Wilcoxon test), methods of descriptive statistics, and data visualization. The conducted survey revealed that one of the main reasons why customers of Slovak small and medium enterprises do not buy green wooden products is their high price and lack of information related to them. When making purchases, our respondents also take quality and safety of green products into account. Based on the results of our research, the individual steps in the process of implementing green product innovations in an enterprise were proposed for Slovak small and medium enterprises. It is suggested that SMEs should place emphasis on responsible approach to the environment, long-term effort to make their operations sustainable, and providing green products in order to achieve smooth implementation of green innovations into their operations.

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