Cross cultural communication
Annotation: This article illustrates a several number of opinions about the cross-cultural communication , in different parts of world
Key words: Cross-culture, communication, endeavor, investigating, geographies, intercultural
Cross-cultural communication is a field of study investigating how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavor to communicate across cultures. Intercultural communication is a related field of study. Often referred to as intercultural communication, cross-cultural communication is the study of how verbal and nonverbal communication takes place among individuals from different backgrounds, geographies, and cultures.
As you can see, the definition is very straightforward, but learning how to implement cross-cultural communication into your career is not as black and white. Communication is also the core of publishing statements to broad audiences, monitoring all communication coming from clients, and preparing stakeholders for the worst are all duties of a PR professional.
With the globalization of businesses, PR professionals, in particular, must learn about cross-cultural communication and its impact on the PR industry so they don't make the mistake of misrepresenting a culture.
It is important to note before diving into the details of cross-cultural communication that there are cultural generalizations that do not account for specific individuals in a culture. For example, different countries around the world interpret hand gestures in different ways.
Since cross-cultural communication is how people belonging to different cultures communicate with each other, there are bound to be clashes between different cultures. One tactic to reduce these clashes is prioritizing diversity when hiring. When people from differing cultures work toward a common goal, the risk of offensive misunderstandings decreases, and the quality of work increases.
Communication is the exchange of meaning: it is my attempt to let you know what I mean. Communication includes any behavior that another human being perceives and interprets: it is your understanding of what I mean. Communication includes sending both verbal messages (words) and nonverbal messages (tone of voice, facial expression, behavior, and physical setting). It includes consciously sent messages as well as messages that the sender is totally unaware of sending. Whatever I say and do, I cannot help communicating. Communication therefore involves a complex, multilayered, dynamic process through which we exchange meaning.
Every communication has a message sender and a message receiver. The sent message is never identical to the received message. Why? Communication is indirect; it is a symbolic behavior. Ideas, feelings, and pieces of information cannot be communicated directly but must be externalized or symbolized before being communicated. Encoding describes the producing of a symbol message. Decoding describes the receiving of a message from a symbol. The message sender must encode his or her meaning into a form that the receiver will recognize-that is, into words and behavior. Receivers must then decode the words and behavior - the symbols - back into messages that have meaning for them.
For example because the Cantonese word for “eight” sounds like jaat, which means prosperity, a Hong Kong textile manufacturer Mr. Lau Ting-pong paid $5 million in 1988 for car registration number 8. A year later a European millionaire paid $4.8 million at Hong Kong’s Lunar New Year auction for vehicle registration number 7, a decision that mystified the Chinese, since the number 7 has little significance in the Chinese calculation of fortune. Translating meanings into words and behaviors - that is into symbols - and back again into meanings is based on a person's cultural background and is not the same for each person. The greater the difference in background between senders and receivers, the greater the difference in meanings attached to particular words and behaviors.
Cross-cultural communication occurs when a person from one culture sends message to a person from another culture. Cross-cultural miscommunication occurs when the person from the second culture does not receive the sender's intended message. The greater the differences between the sender's and the receiver's cultures, the greater the chance for cross-cultural miscommunication.
Communication does not necessarily result in understanding. Cross-cultural communication continually involves misunderstanding caused by misperception, misinterpretation, and misevaluation. When the sender of a message comes from one culture and the receiver from another, the chances of accurately transmitting a message are low. Foreigners see, interpret, and evaluate things differently, and consequently act upon them differently. In approaching cross-cultural situations, one should therefore assume difference until similarity is proven. It is also important to recognize that all behavior makes sense through the eyes of the person behaving and that logic and rationale are culturally relative. In cross-cultural situations, labeling behavior as bizarre usually reflects culturally based misperception, misinterpretation, and misevaluation; rarely does it reflect intentional malice or pathologically motivated behavior. Unwritten rules reflect a culture's interpretation of its surroundings.
CROSS-CULTURAL MISPERCEPTION No two national groups see the world in exactly the same way. Perception is the process by which each individual selects, organizes, and evaluates stimuli from the external environment to provide meaningful experiences for himself or herself. Perceptual patterns are neither innate nor absolute. They are selective, learned, culturally determined, consistent, and inaccurate. • Perception is selective. At any one time there are too many stimuli in the environment for us to observe. Therefore, we screen out most of what we see, hear, taste, and feel. We screen out the overload and allow only selected information through our perceptual screen to our conscious mind. • Perceptual patterns are learned. We are not born seeing the world in one particular way. Our experience teaches us to perceive the world in certain ways. • Perception is culturally determined. We learn to see the world in a certain way based on our cultural background. • Perception tends to remain constant. Once we see something in a particular way, we continue to see it that way. • We therefore see things that do not exist, and do not see things that do exist.
Our interests, values, and culture act as filters and lead us to distort, block, and even create what we choose to see and hear. We perceive what we expect to perceive. We perceive things according to what we have been trained to see, according to our cultural map. The distorting impact of perceptual filters causes us to see things that do not exist.
Interpretation occurs when an individual gives meaning to observations and their relationships; it is the process of making sense out of perceptions. Interpretation organizes our experience to guide our behavior. Based on our experience, we make assumptions about our perceptions so we will not have to rediscover meanings each time we encounter similar situations. For example, we make assumptions about how doors work, based on our experience of entering and leaving rooms; thus we do not have to relearn each time we have to open a door. Similarly, when we smell smoke, we generally assume there is a fire. Our consistent patterns of interpretation help us to act appropriately and quickly within our day-to-day world. Categories Since we are constantly bombarded with more stimuli than we can absorb and more perceptions than we can keep distinct, we only perceive those images that may be meaningful. We group perceived images into familiar categories that help to simplify our environment, become the basis for our interpretations, and allow us to function in an otherwise overly complex world.
Categories of perceived images become ineffective when we place people and things in the wrong group. Cross-cultural miscategorization occurs when I use my home country categories to make sense out of foreign situations. Stereotypes Stereotyping involves a form of categorization that organizes our experience and guides our behavior toward ethnic and national groups. Stereotypes never describe individual behavior; rather, they describe the behavioral norm for members of a particular group. Stereotypes, like other forms of categories, can be helpful or harmful depending on how we use them. Effective stereotyping allows people to understand and act appropriately in new situations. A stereotype can be helpful when it is • Consciously held. The person should be aware that he or she is describing a group norm rather than the characteristics of a specific individual. • Descriptive rather than evaluative. The stereotype should describe what people from this group will probably be like and not evaluate those people as good or bad. • Accurate. The stereotype should accurately describe the norm for the group to which the person belongs. • The first best guess about a group prior to having direct information about the specific person or persons involved.
Modified, based on further observation and experience with the actual people and situations. A subconsciously held stereotype is difficult to modify or discard even after we collect real information about a person, because it is often thought to reflect reality. If a subconscious stereotype also inaccurately evaluates a person or situation, we are likely to maintain an inappropriate, ineffective, and frequently harmful guide to reality. Managers ranked "most internationally effective" by their colleagues altered their stereotypes to fit the actual people involved, whereas managers ranked "least internationally effective" continued to maintain their stereotypes even in the face of contradictory information. To be effective, international managers must therefore be aware of cultural stereotypes and learn to set them aside when faced with contradictory evidence. They cannot pretend not to stereotype. If stereotyping is so useful as an initial guide to reality, why do people criticize it? The answer is that we have failed to accept stereotyping as a natural process and have consequently failed to learn to use it to our advantage.
For years we have viewed stereotyping as a form of primitive thinking, as an unnecessary simplification of reality. We have also viewed stereotyping as immoral: stereotypes can be inappropriate judgments of individuals based on inaccurate descriptions of groups. It is true that labeling people from a certain ethnic group as "bad" is immoral, but grouping individuals into categories is neither good nor bad-it simply reduces a complex reality to manageable dimensions. Negative views of stereotyping simply cloud our ability to understand people's actual behavior and impair our awareness of our own stereotypes.
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