Intercultural communication
Effective business communication is the way that people communicate in a setting to build relations with each other. Effective business communication is important for the sharing of views, opinions and issues. This is a two way process where one party listens and another party speaks the message. Every employee needs to improve their communication and make it effective so that they are able to communicate in a clear way which defines their message properly to the receiver. This skill is very important for the success of an employee-employer or employee-client relationship. The essay will discuss about one of the concepts of communication which is intercultural communication. The essay will discuss about the concept of intercultural communication and conduct a literature review on the same topic. Furthermore, the essay will discuss about the application of intercultural communication and organisational communication for future career aspirations followed by a conclusion which will summarise the discussions of the whole essay.
Intercultural communication or cross-cultural communication is the situation where people from different cultural background interact or communicate with each other. When messages are sent to and from people who belong to separate culture, then it is known as intercultural communication. There are two context of cultures as discussed in the unit. The two contexts are high-context culture and low-context culture. High-context culture is where the individuals give more importance to the context as well as the message. Low-context culture is where the message is given the most importance. Intercultural communication is an important aspect of business communication since it provides the opportunity to communicate with people from different cultures. Knowing the different cultures and communicating with the people from different culture will help to eradicate the boundaries that are present between the people with cultural differences. Intercultural communication is challenging than any other form of communication. Intercultural communication is very common for international organisations as they have to deal with clients from different cultures on almost a daily basis. A proper intercultural communication is one where both the parties are aware of each other’s behavioral tendencies. This knowledge helps in a successful intercultural communication.
According to Sharifan (2013), intercultural communication occurs through different cultural languages which enables people to communicate with each other without any barriers of language. The different ways through which the speakers can communicate with each other based on their own experiences is discussed in this article. On the other hand, Liu. Volcic and Gallois (2014) in their article describes that culture, thoughts and language is important and they are closely connected to each other and influence one another. Therefore, a successful intercultural communication not only depends on what is being said to the other party but the way the message is being communicated to them. There are four types of communication styles or dimensions which are present in an intercultural communication. They are – direct/indirect, personal/contextual, elaborate/succinct and instrumental/affective. These dimensions help to form a complete direction towards the intercultural communication with different parties.
Literature Review
Sharifian and Jamarani (2013) state in their book that intercultural communication initially focused a great deal on the miscommunication between the non-native and the native speakers of the English language. In the initial stage the people who were not able to communicate in English were not able to express themselves to the other people who did not know their country language. Hence, this was a big scope for miscommunication among people. However, with the change in technology, there have been many changes in the eradicating the miscommunication that happens between intercultural people (Sharifian 2013). People can derive the meaning of any word or sentence spoken in another language from the internet which has made intercultural communication much easier and have given it a broad scope. Moreover, this growth and changes in the field of intercultural communication have shown new opportunities to the people as well as faced them with several challenges regarding intercultural communication and have made it more complex in nature.
As discussed by Zhang, Ting-Toomey and Oetzel (2014) face recognition theory is the framework which helps to understand the different cultural contexts though the face work of different people. Face is the unique part of every individual which shows the self-image of every person. Face work is known as the behaviour of communication through which an individual will be saving their own face and threatens the face of other individuals. The article discusses that all the cultures try to communicate by maintain and negotiation their face. People who believe in collectivism are seen to be more mutual faced whereas people who depend more on their individual communication which is individualism is seen to be more self-face oriented and competitive in nature. In the individualistic culture, there are more face works which states that the individuals are autonomous and view themselves as important which is why they work hard to promote themselves and their self-esteem than the other people (Kealey 2015). On the other hand, in a collectivist culture the face work is not self-oriented and there is dominance of the group over an individual. In the collectivist culture, face loss will be followed by hard work from the group so that the loss can be regained. Moreover, the group is capable of taking criticism from others and change them accordingly, along with appreciating the ability of the other people. There are no personal attacks in a collective setting and collaboration is favoured so that a relationship of trust can be developed among the members of the group.
Barriers to Intercultural Communication
Along with the effective nature of intercultural communication in current times, there are also certain barriers which becomes an issue for the people with different cultures. The barriers of intercultural communication are as follows. Firstly, the difference in the language is the most important barrier. People who come from different cultures are bound to speak different languages which causes a hindrance in effective communication. Not just the language, the difference in accents, dialects can also cause a problem during proper communication. Words cannot be only used to translate one language to another, since one word may have different meaning for different people. If effective intercultural communication is not present, then people will not be able to express their views and opinions and hence will not be able to mix with the other people. Secondly, body language can be another barrier in effective intercultural communication (Nickolayev et al. 2015). Body language is different for people of different cultures, and people can take offense due to this difference in body language since they will not be able to understand what the individual is willing to express. Thirdly, emotions is another barrier to intercultural communication. This is because people from different cultures have different ways to express their emptions. Some are open about their emotions and are comfortable showing it such as sadness, excitement and others. Whereas, there are people from certain cultures who are more practical in their approach and do not like to display their emotions in front of a lot of people. Therefore, difference in the culture can cause extreme emotions such as anxiety among people. People who are open about their emotions might be able to receive help from the people around whereas the other group of people might suffer from withdrawal since they will not be able to express their emotions or fear.
Finally, Kecskes (2015) discusses about the language gap that is present in intercultural communication which becomes a major issue during the communication of people to one another. However, the language gap need not always be a barrier but also positive since it gives more scope to learn new language and cultural aspects from one another. There are many success situations where people have been able to overcome the above mentioned barriers with hard work and support from their peers. They have been able to gain insight and knowledge about the differences in the culture and thereby the different positive facts which come with it (Kim 2015). Intercultural communication is therefore said to be very vast area where people can find the scope to improve and gain knowledge about new aspects of communication and culture.
In current times, intercultural communication is inevitable due to the aspect of globalization. It emphasizes on the communication with people from different cultures which will help to develop the communication skills in the workplace. Intercultural communication is also helpful in many career opportunities. They help to develop skills so that the intercultural clients could communicate freely and properly with the employee without any fear of not understanding or misunderstanding the opinions of the clients. A proper intercultural communication will help to gain knowledge about different cultures (Zhang 2015). To successfully communicate with the intercultural people the beliefs, values, behaviour and attitudes of the people has to be determined so that it becomes easy to communicate with them. Intercultural communication will also expose the person towards several new languages which might be beneficial in the long run as the individual will be able to speak several languages which might give him an edge in the future times of his career.
On the other hand, organisation communication means the process through which an individual manages, maintains and coordinates the activities and relatio9nships that are present in an organisation both internally and externally. Organisation communication is more of a formal communication process where different hierarchy within the organisations demands different ways of communication (Cobley and Schulz 2013). The system if hierarchy decides who can talk to whom and at what time. Organisation communication is a very important form of communication which prepares an individual for their future in a corporate sector. The process through which the different levels of people can speak to one another. More than any other communication, organisation communication will prepare an individual for the future and the ways that the person will communicate with the other individuals.
Conclusion
Hence, it can be concluded from the intercultural communication is a very important form of communication which is used in organisation as well in other settings which can help to gain knowledge about different languages and cultures through communication with other people. Moreover, the different career aspirations for both intercultural communication and organisation communication are mentioned in the essay. The different ways that the communication can be done with people around the world is developed in the essay along the importance of such types of communication and the ways through which this communication can help in an organisational setting.
References
Cobley, P. and Schulz, P.J. eds., 2013. Theories and models of communication (Vol. 1). Walter de Gruyter.
Kealey, D.J., 2015. Some strengths and weaknesses of 25 years of Research on Intercultural Communication Competence: Personal Reflections. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 48, pp.14-16.
Kecskes, I., 2015. Intracultural communication and intercultural communication: Are they different?. International Review of Pragmatics, 7(2), pp.171-194.
Kim, Y.Y., 2015. Achieving synchrony: A foundational dimension of intercultural communication competence. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 48, pp.27-37.
Liu, S., Volcic, Z. and Gallois, C., 2014. Introducing intercultural communication: Global cultures and contexts. Sage.
Nickolayev, V.P., Svintorzhitskaja, I.A., Bondar, I.A. and Ermakova, L.I., 2015. On subtle distinctions between lingual communication and interlingual miscommunication. European Journal of Science and Theology, 11(4), pp.159-168.
Sharifian, F., 2013. Cultural linguistics and intercultural communication. In Language and intercultural communication in the New Era (pp. 74-94). Routledge.
Sharifian, F. and Jamarani, M. eds., 2013. Language and intercultural communication in the new era. Routledge.
Zhang, Q., Ting-Toomey, S. and Oetzel, J.G., 2014. Linking emotion to the conflict face-negotiation theory: A US-China investigation of the mediating effects of anger, compassion, and guilt in interpersonal conflict. Human Communication Research, 40(3), pp.373-395.
Zhang, Y., 2015. Intercultural communication competence: Advising international students in a Texas community college. The Journal of the National Academic Advising Association, 35(2), pp.48-59.
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