Good Example Of Essay On Cross-Cultural Communication

Cross-cultural communication is one of the most dynamic fields of study that seeks to clarify how people from different cultural backgrounds communicate and integrate their similarities and differences to help them perform different tasks. Culture has a significant influence on the approach people use to reach a common goal (Grey, C. 2013). When people of different cultures work together communication is the most important thing as it helps them work and move as a team. Although cultural profiling may affect the team negatively and derail the process of integration, identifying a common goal helps in breaking down the cultural differences barrier and speeds up integration. The concept of shared value helped break down the cultural differences and promote integration and cooperation among the group members (Levin and Campbell 1972, 26).
One of the main sources of conflict in an intercultural relationship is ethnocentrism; the act of evaluating other cultures with the standards of one’s culture (Ting-Toomey 1999). Ethnocentrism was one of our greatest challenges during the initial stages of our interactions. Everyone believed that his or her culture was best and used values from their culture in judging the effectiveness of the actions of others. However, as we interacted more these negative connotations slowly faded away. We were able to understand our cultural differences and embrace ethno-relativism ‘mutual respect to other people’s beliefs cultural practices and approaches to different life situations (Ting-Toomey 1999, 34).

Challenges

Integrating people from various backgrounds was a challenging task that we faced during our interactions. The fact that we lived thousands of miles from each other and interacted via electronic media limited our interactions and made it difficult to achieve our tasks. This limited our commitment to the common goal.

Benefits

One of the major benefits was that we had many approaches of solving different challenges we met. Our diversity helped us come up with many solutions to the problems we faced and it was easy for us to pick the most workable solutions.

References

Grey, C. 2013. A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap book about studying organizations. 3rd Edition. London: SAGE Publications Ltd
Levin and Campbell 1972. cited in Witney, D. 2011. Global Business Communication. United Kingdom: McGraw-Hill Education
Ting-Toomey .1999. cited in Witney, D. 2011. Global Business Communication. United Kingdom: McGraw-Hill Education