Free Essays on Cross Cultural Communication

Communicating Across Cultural Barriers All international business activity involves communication. Within the international and global business environment, activities such as exchanging information and ideas, decision making, negotiating, motivating , and leading are all based on the ability of managers from other cultures. Achieving effective communication is a challenge to managers worldwide even when the workforce is culturally homogeneous, but when one company includes a variety of languages and cultural backgrounds, effective two-way communication becomes even more difficult. We think that the major obstacle in international business is in understanding the foreigner, the difficulty involves becoming aware of our own cultural conditioning . We are generally least aware of our own cultural characteristics and are quite surprised when we hear foreigner’s descriptions of us. For example, many Americans are surprised to discover that they are seen by foreigner as hurried, overly law-abiding, very hard working, extremely explicit, and overly inquisitive. Projective similarity refers to the assumption that people are more similar to you than they actually are, or that a situation is similar to yours when in fact it is not. Projected similarity involves assuming, imagining, and actually perceiving similarity when differences exist. Projected similarity particularly handicaps people in cross-cultural situations. At the base of projected similarity is a subconscious parochialism. I assume that there is only one way to be: my way. I assume that there is only one way to see the world: my way. I therefore view other people in reference to me and to my way of viewing the world. While it is important to understand and respect the foreigner’s point of view, it is not necessary to accept or adopt it. One of the best exercises for developing empathy and reducing parochialism and projected similarity is role reversa... Free Essays on Cross Cultural Communication Free Essays on Cross Cultural Communication Communicating Across Cultural Barriers All international business activity involves communication. Within the international and global business environment, activities such as exchanging information and ideas, decision making, negotiating, motivating , and leading are all based on the ability of managers from other cultures. Achieving effective communication is a challenge to managers worldwide even when the workforce is culturally homogeneous, but when one company includes a variety of languages and cultural backgrounds, effective two-way communication becomes even more difficult. We think that the major obstacle in international business is in understanding the foreigner, the difficulty involves becoming aware of our own cultural conditioning . We are generally least aware of our own cultural characteristics and are quite surprised when we hear foreigner’s descriptions of us. For example, many Americans are surprised to discover that they are seen by foreigner as hurried, overly law-abiding, very hard working, extremely explicit, and overly inquisitive. Projective similarity refers to the assumption that people are more similar to you than they actually are, or that a situation is similar to yours when in fact it is not. Projected similarity involves assuming, imagining, and actually perceiving similarity when differences exist. Projected similarity particularly handicaps people in cross-cultural situations. At the base of projected similarity is a subconscious parochialism. I assume that there is only one way to be: my way. I assume that there is only one way to see the world: my way. I therefore view other people in reference to me and to my way of viewing the world. While it is important to understand and respect the foreigner’s point of view, it is not necessary to accept or adopt it. One of the best exercises for developing empathy and reducing parochialism and projected similarity is role reversa... Free Essays on Cross Cultural Communication Cross Cultural Communication Assignment assessing the differences in two cultures on the basis of Universalistic Vs Particularistic Cultures With topic of global project in Finland Acknowledgements In the process of doing this assignment, I have taken the help of a number of persons, amongst whom the most important is my professor. Thanks are to him for the continuous support that he has given me. The large number of books available in the library of Skyline College has been a great help. Also, the vast information made available online by a number of online libraries has been a source of great knowledge. I have also taken help from the Internet services that have been provided by the college’s online faculty of libraries, from where I got the main idea of the case of this assignment – Global project especially in Finland Mukesh Kumar Jangid Contents Acknowledgements 2 Contents 3 Introduction 4 What is Culture? 4 The seven dilemmas 4 The aim of this assignment 5 Main Body 6 Topic taken for discussion – International Business Constructions 6 Universalism Vs Particularism in detail 6 Universalism 6 Particularism 6 Details of the example –global project 7 How does culture affect global project? 7 Cultural analysis 7 Example of Punctuality 8 Conclusions 10 My solution to cultural problems 10 Bibliography 11 Introduction In today’s world, everyone is expanding from local markets to international markets. Initially the companies, who used to be the leaders in the local market, are now entering international markets and thus they are becoming multinational companies. Although there are a number of factors that firms take into account while going international, there is an increasing demands to find out that the most important resource of any organization, people. Since many different kinds of people come to contact with each other, while going international, there is a need to know...