Culture’s Impact on Communication

Despite the Challenges, Effective Intercultural Communication is Vital

Despite the fact that different groups now live together as a result of globalization, effective communication with people from other cultures remains difficult. Cultural backgrounds provide people with distinct ways of thinking and understanding information provided by another party, and as a result, the same words may have diverse meanings across cultures. Communication is important in how we communicate with one another and conduct meaningful conversations that progress the development of the society in which we live. Despite this, cultural variations make communication a difficult subject that must be addressed in order to comprehend the benefits and challenges of intercultural communication. Communication, on the other hand, is the way that people disseminate information from one party to another with the aim of ideas. Communication is a significant part of a culture because it is the only way that people within a given group understand each other.

Discussion

There are two significant areas of communication affected by an individual’s cultural background, and these are converting meaning into behavior, and decode the behavior back to a literal meaning (Oliver, 2012). It means that the person who is communicating must convert his information, feelings, and ideas into words so that the audience will understand the message and then the receiver decodes the message. Communication, therefore, depends on one’s cultural background to determine the meanings attached to certain behaviors and words.

The difference in communication styles establishes the extent of meaning that people put in actual worst and these are defined by high-context communication and low-context communication. Low-context refers to a system whereby people translate most of a meaning into an explicit code; thus, it is the spoken word that carries more weight. In this case, people do not beat around the bush when conveying a particular message, and this makes it more complicated since words that are spoken have to make up for most of what is missing in the context (Adler & Gundersen, 2008). High-context, on the other hand, is the opposite of low-context and this is engraved mainly in non-verbal communication. High-context communication tends to be very efficient because it majorly relies on intuitive understanding.

Cross-cultural Communication in Business

Cross-cultural communication affects business communication in three major ways:

Misperception – perceptual patterns are culturally determined, and as a result, they tend to be inaccurate, and this is because whatever is perceived right within the United States may not be acceptable in the Middle East, such as women sitting with their legs crossed over each other. This is a sign that perception is culturally sensitive and this is a risk factor to many misunderstandings. Therefore, people need to learn about certain values held within individual communities before practicing any form of communication.

Misinterpretation – interpretation takes place when one gives meaning to what he or she observes, and this is the process of decoding a message (Gibson, 2015). This determines whether a relationship between two parties remains informal or formal based on the values that the two parties hold. It is important that people learn to understand how different people interpret different messages before carrying one’s self in a particular manner.

Misevaluation – Evaluation is the process of judging whether something is good or bad, and in most cases, people use their cultural backgrounds to evaluate what is right and wrong in their environment. In this case, people need to be open-minded and receptive of the differences that exist in the different cultures.

Conclusion

Various aspects of global communication are affected by existing cultural differences and what prevails in many cases are the challenges that people face in communication caused by various cultural backgrounds. As a result, most of the industrialized countries emphasize the need to have a standard language of communication or encourage people to employ written messages instead of face-to-face communication to minimize cases of misunderstandings. In the case of any query regarding this information discussed in this memo, kindly contact me through my email address so that I can elaborate any point in detail.

References

Adler, N. J., & Gundersen, A. (2008). International dimensions of organizational behavior. Mason, OH: Thomson.

Gibson, R. (2015). Intercultural business communication (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

Oliver, R. T. (2012). Culture and communication: the problem of penetrating national and cultural boundaries. Whitefish, MT: Literary Licensing.