I...1 – Intercultural communication is the process of sending and receiving messages between people whose cultural backgrounds could lead them to interpret verbal and nonverbal signs differently.
I.1 – The Opportunities in a Global Marketplace
Two trends contribute to the importance of intercultural communication: advances in economic globalization and the increasing diversity of the workforce.
Chances are you’ll be communicating across international borders sometime in your career:
- Local markets are opening to worldwide competition.
- You’ll face cultural and language barriers among customers and employees.
I.2 – The Advantages of a Diverse Workforce
Many innovative companies have changed the way they approach diversity, from being a legal requirement to provide equal opportunities to being a strategic opportunity:
Connecting with diverse customers
- Taking advantage of the broadest possible pool of talent
Diversity
- Brings a broader range of viewpoints and ideas
- Helps companies understand and identify with diverse markets
- Enables companies to tap into a wider range of employee talents
I.3 – The Challenges of Intercultural Communication
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- Diversity can affect employee behaviour on the job, which presents challenges to
- Supervisors (communicating with diverse employees, motivating them, and fostering cooperation and harmony among them)
- Teams (working together closely)
- Companies (coexisting peacefully with business partners and the community as a whole)
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- Cultural diversity affects how business messages are conceived, planned, sent, received, and interpreted in the workplace. The interaction of culture and communication is so pervasive that separating the two is virtually impossible. Culture defines many aspects of communication, including the
- Meaning of words
- Significance of gestures
- Importance of time and space
- Rules of human relationships
Culture influences the ways in which one encodes and decodes messages. The greater the difference between cultures, the greater the chance for misunderstanding. Misunderstandings arise when
- Senders encode messages based on the assumptions of their own culture, and
- Receivers decode those messages based on the assumptions of their culture(s)