Cross-cultural communication
Cross-Cultural Communication
As discussed earlier, managers increasingly find themselves functioning within a global environment. This trend toward a borderless world complicates the communication process and thereby threatens the manager’s success when attempting to build rapport, probe for information, and interpret nonverbal behaviours. Let’s begin this discussion by explaining the role culture plays in the communication process, and by pointing out key factors that increase the likelihood of mutual understanding.
Culture can be defined as “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another, … the set of common characteristics that influence a human group’s response to its environment”. At the same time it represents the social legacy that is passed down from generation to generation and reflects what a particular group or society has found to work best within their environment. However, most cultural assumptions and perceptions that direct our behaviour exist on a subconscious level.
Culture affects the communication process by influencing an individual’s values, attitudes, language, thought processes and nonverbal communicative behaviour. The likelihood of successful communication taking place will therefore be a function of the compatibility of two cultures or the degree to which each communicator is willing and able to adjust to cultural differences. In other words, culture can be considered noise that interferes with the effective exchange of information. As communicators attempt to cut across cultural boundaries, the sender must encode thoughts using one cultural framework, while the receiver must decode them in another. As environmental noise, culture acts to distort the message that is being sent and thereby produces a mismatch between the sender’s meaning and the receiver’s interpretation of that meaning. Such filtering produces a situation of perceived conflict rather than actual conflict which we
As discussed earlier, managers increasingly find themselves functioning within a global environment. This trend toward a borderless world complicates the communication process and thereby threatens the manager’s success when attempting to build rapport, probe for information, and interpret nonverbal behaviours. Let’s begin this discussion by explaining the role culture plays in the communication process, and by pointing out key factors that increase the likelihood of mutual understanding.
Culture can be defined as “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another, … the set of common characteristics that influence a human group’s response to its environment”. At the same time it represents the social legacy that is passed down from generation to generation and reflects what a particular group or society has found to work best within their environment. However, most cultural assumptions and perceptions that direct our behaviour exist on a subconscious level.
Culture affects the communication process by influencing an individual’s values, attitudes, language, thought processes and nonverbal communicative behaviour. The likelihood of successful communication taking place will therefore be a function of the compatibility of two cultures or the degree to which each communicator is willing and able to adjust to cultural differences. In other words, culture can be considered noise that interferes with the effective exchange of information. As communicators attempt to cut across cultural boundaries, the sender must encode thoughts using one cultural framework, while the receiver must decode them in another. As environmental noise, culture acts to distort the message that is being sent and thereby produces a mismatch between the sender’s meaning and the receiver’s interpretation of that meaning. Such filtering produces a situation of perceived conflict rather than actual conflict which we