intercultural communications

Introduction

Background: the high pace of globalization determines the ever increasingly multicultural work environment, leading to an inevitable trend of the development of intercultural communications within organizations. It can be seen that communications across various cultures characterizes today’s business. Therefore, in addition to know how to do business, it is equally important for organizations to enhance the intercultural communications among staffs to cope with cultural differences in order to succeed and prosper.

Thesis statement: it is true that in today’s increasingly globalized business world, knowledge of business alone is not sufficient to achieve success a greater awareness of intercultural communications is also required.

Theoretical framework

The cultural dimensions theory developed by Hofstede can be applied for cross-cultural communication. This theory uses factor analysis to explain differences between cultures (Shi, 2001), which offering guidance for multicultural organizations to deal with relationship, leadership, teamwork building, etc. among its staffs.

The Intercultural Adaption Model (IAM) focuses specially on illustrating the process of communicative adjustment during cross-cultural interactions (Ishiyama & Westwood, 1992). This model illustrates the psychological phases of people

when contacting with people from different cultures.

Supportive arguments

The primary importance of intercultural communications is to deal with the language difference which presents an imperfect form of communication (Targowski & Metwalli, 2003). Effective intercultural communications can bridge the gap and make the words to convey the idea to everyone accurately.

The enhancement of awareness of intercultural communications can help the organizations to avoid conflict among its staffs (Zaharna, 2000). As the workplace becomes ever more diverse day by day, Hofstede’s explanation of four dimensions of cultural differences suggests that people with different background are easy to collide with others. In this way, the intercultural communication can alert managers to be sensitive to cultural differences and tact to avoid such conflicts.

According to the IAM and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, intercultural communications can help prevent misunderstandings among staffs since people from different cultures can exchange information frequently and ensure everyone can be understood (Van et al, 2002). For example, the English expression \"to shoulder responsibility\" translates into Swedish as \"be a man for your hat.\" With intercultural communications, organizations do not need to depend on expressions native to a particular language which is easy to lead to confusion.

Intercultural communications can foster respect since the values and worship of one person can be understood and respected by others according to IAM and Hofstede’s theory. Effective intercultural communications does not means ignorance of society differences, instead, it respects the variations among human race and ensures information can be transmitted clearly (Milton, 1998).

With higher cross-cultural communication skills and cultural intelligence, employers can gain a competitive edge and find it easier to break into foreign markets (Condon & Yousef, 2005). On the one hand, employees from various countries can inject fresh blood to the organization. On the other hand, with employees from different cultures, it is easier for organizations to compete in the global market.

Conclusions

Reference:

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