COMMUNICATION ACROSS CULTURES
February 11th 2015
During my third class of intercultural manager, we discussed the importance of the communication between cultures and how difficult understanding it is, starting on the activity that we did in the last class (The Derdians) this activity was basically two teams, the first one was the engineers that had to plan the building of a bridge for the Derdian community, and the second one was the Derdians that had to build the bridge with the instructions of the engineers, this activity led us understand the barriers that sometimes people have communicating with a different culture that has different ways to think, completely different manners and norms.
In the class we analyzed all the points that the communication between cultures contain and how barriers in the intercultural communication can affect business across cultures and within it.
At the beginning, the teacher, Heiko Schmidt, pointed the basic model for communication created by David Berlo that is called The Process of Communication, this gave us an idea and a context in where the communication is based on.
The model show us that in every communication must be at least two sides, one the sender that encodes the message through a channel and the other the receiver that decodes the message and get what the sender is trying to communicate, this leads us to understand how cultures takes the misunderstandings; there is basically two ways to understand this: in low context and in high context, Schmidt, explain (and it was very funny) that in some countries or cultures the misunderstanding is because the receiver is fool and does not understand what has been said for example in Colombia, and in other countries the misunderstanding happens in the other way (in this case the fool is the sender)
Now that we are talking about the misunderstanding in communication lets move to the
QUESTION!!!
- Which cultures are in the low context and in the high context and what are the implications about this?
First of all we have to know what is exactly low context communication and high context communication and what are the main differences between them.
A low context culture is one where everything that we said is totally explained and there is not independence in what has been written.
A high context culture is one where everything that we said is not as much as explained as is written or spoken, this means that we have to pay more attention on other non-verbal communication.
The cultures that have low context communications are: Anglos, Germanics and Scandinavians.
The cultures that have high context communications are: Japanese, Arabs, French.
According to Brett Rutledge, world champion of public speaking and executive communication and specialist writes about communication "Japanese can find westerns to be offensively blunt. westerns can find Japanese to be secretive and devious. and French can feel that Germans insult their intelligence by explaining the obvious, while Germans can feel that French managers provide no directions"
With that said, we moved to the barriers in the intercultural communication. There are six aspects that make the communication across countries very difficult: "1) Assumption of similarities, 2) Language differences, 3) Nonverbal misinterpretations, 4) Preconceptions and stereotypes, 5) Tendency to evaluate, 6) High anxiety; These six aspects basically explain why is difficult to communicate with other cultures even if they speak the same language". (Schmidt, H.)
In other hand was very interesting the non-verbal communication because it is the 50% of the entire communication process also because is amazing how people with different culture and language can communicate with their own body or with symbols and signs, but this also has misunderstandings and is very interesting how little changes of personality, history and some Kilometers away, all this non verbal communication that a country has changed.
Bibliography
- Schmidt, H. (Director) (2015, January 27). Communicating across Cultures. Lecture PowerPoint. Lecture conducted from EAFIT University, Medellin.
-Rutledge, B. (2011, August 21). Cultural Differences - High Context versus Low Context. Retrieved January 11, 2015, from http://thearticulateceo.typepad.com/my-blog/2011/08/cultural-differences-high-context-versus-low-context.html
No hay comentarios.:
Publicar un comentario