What Is The Importance Of Cross Cultural Communication
By Shahnawaz Alam
14 October, 2022
Business
Last Updated on: October 24th, 2024
Shaking your head to reply to any question means a negative answer in Western culture. But, the same is used for a positive reply if you come to the southern part of India. Communicating across cultures is hard enough.
The diversity of expressions, words, and languages makes it hard for us to communicate effectively. But building a relationship for business or personal reasons across cultures requires clear communication between two people. This article can help you unlock the importance of cross cultural communication.
What Is cross cultural Communication?
Cross culture communication is the ability to understand, interpret, and correctly reply to people from another culture. We are often open to building misconceptions and misinterpreting situations, speeches, people, and incidents due to a difference between cultures.
We often mistake one thing for another when communicating across cultures. This leads to a disrupted connection in business and personal relationships. For example, some gestures of an American businessperson will not have the same meaning as that of an Asian businessman. That is why it is important to improve cross cultural communication skills.
Importance Of Cross Cultural Communication
cross culturalism will grow as the world gets more connected through technology. Whether you want to thrive in the business world or build a personal relationships across cultures, cross cultural communication skills will come to help. Here are some important aspects of cross cultural communication.
1. Communication Builds Trust
One important aspect of cross cultural communication is clarity. Good cross cultural communication can help build a clear understanding of businesses across different countries. It can help build and foster relationships and trust in the process.
Employees and customers who understand the difference between cultures are likely to pay close attention to minimal differences. Their close attention can help mitigate miscommunication and gaps in communication across cultures.
2. Increased Productivity And Profits
Good cross cultural communication can help boost productivity and help generate profit. Improved communication can help minimize misinterpretation. It helps make the right decision at the right time. Minimum misinterpretation can help better strategize business goals.
Business allies across cultures with more trust, lesser misconceptions, and better participation can outshine their competitors with a more productive workforce. Clear communication can help businesses and people collaborate across cultures. It also helps build a sense of unity. Such is the importance of cross cultural communication.
3. Breaking Cultural Barriers
All cultures have preconceptions, stereotypes, and prejudice that cloud their vision of people from another culture. Without communication of seeing a person of a different culture up close, we cannot come to a conclusion about how they are.
Cross cultural communication can help break down these barriers of prejudices and bring them under an objective light. A cross cultural communication can help break misconceptions about different cultures. It is one importance of cross cultural communication that we cannot deny.
4. Developing Listening Skills
Whether it is for your career or your personal life, active listening is a skill a lot of not born with. But you can slowly develop it. Cross cultural communication can help you improve your skill to listen actively. Through multicultural communications, you can focus on what to listen to, where to pay attention to, and how to interpret someone’s speech through a broader spectrum.
Good listening skills can also help you build better communication skills. So it works both ways if you ask me.
5. Creativity
The more cultural taste and flavors you expose yourself to, your creative skills improve. When varieties of cultures influence you, your thoughts and vision will expand. It gives you a larger space to think upon and more elements and resources to creatively work with.
Especially if your work involves any kind of writing, drawing, or creative side, you will understand the importance of multicultural communications. Besides, an improved creative skill can also boost your problem-solving skills.
6. Human Resources
When it comes to the importance of cross cultural communications, it influences the business side much more. The human resource department has the most benefit in this regard. When the HR department is good with multicultural communication, they can successfully employ or hire talents from across the world.
Such gestures help a business leverage diversity in culture and language. It also helps them create a global image for them.
7. Helps Fulfill Regional Requirements
Businesses with more clarity in communication between cultures can better understand regional requirements. They can attend to these requirements and gain knowledge from regional customers. It helps them build or modify their workforce across the world and leverage local interests.
Communication across cultures can help businesses expand themselves and claim their place in different regional markets.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):
I think that you have already found the answer to your question. However, here are some queries and answers that you may find helpful –
➥ It is very important for students to learn to communicate across cultures. It is best for their career. It helps them understand and learn the language, norms, and behaviors of people from other cultures. A cross cultural communication helps students communicate, setting aside their cultural differences.
➥ cross cultural communication is not only verbal language. It can also be certain gestures we use to greet people. For example, western people have a tradition of shaking hands. But there is a tradition to bow according to the Asian tradition. This is an example of the difference between cultural communication methods.
Ans: Here are the fundamentals of cross cultural communication –
1. Awareness.
It is one type of cross cultural method of communication that describes how different countries can perform different things in different ways! It is about being aware that your way is not the only way or the only correct way!
Developing that awareness of the inception of the idea that there can be different ways in which an event can be handled differently in different cultures is called awareness.
For example, death is dealt with differently in each culture and accordingly, it drives people or individuals who are the members of the culture or the country.
2. Preparation.
Preparation is a significant part of communication because it helps you in understanding the culture of the people of the other culture and adjust with them. The harassment that you or the opposition must face if you are not prepared to deal with the diverse culture might create challenges.
3. Humor.
The mode of communication is funny but not everyone’s cup of tea! Humor is an important part of communication but many often do not get it. It is also used to insult others, verbally attack or infuriate them. People at times crack jokes to resolve tension. There are also issues of nervousness or anger that are often covered with humor.
4. Language.
It is another way of communication in cross-cultural interaction when the main expression is the form of language. The cultural and the social subgroups in a country or a particular geographical region have similar language; however, it changes based on the change in the geography!
It is, therefore, another mode of communication where if you do not know the language, there is miscommunication. There are also counterparts or dialects in the same language leading to further miscommunication.
5. Openness.
The way of communication is the most complicated as people do not like being vulnerable when communicating. They often want the upper hand when they are in a negotiation or argument. Both in personal and professional accounts of cross cultural communication, it is important to have an insight where the cultural reference must be used to maintain transparency.
Final Words
The importance of cross cultural communication is to improve your capacity to adapt to a culturally diverse environment. It can be good for your personal or workplace. Improvement of your communication skill by talking to people from different cultures can help you build yourself as a better employee, a businessman, or a person as a whole.
Did you find this article helpful? Please let us know what you think of cross cultural communication. We would love to read what you think of the same.
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