Cultural Sensitivity

international management behaviour. part 2

Bridging Differences Through Communication


Understanding the lens through which others see the world is an enormous aid to intercultural effectiveness. But this understanding provides little benefit as long as it remains latent. It must be put into use to help the flow of ideas among people in a conversation, a team, or an organization. The goal of these interpersonal flows is effective communication, or the transfer of meaning from one person to another as it was intended by the first person.
Resolving miscommunication depends, in large part, on a manager’s willingness to explain the problem rather than to blame the other person. And the quality of the explanation depends, in a large part, on the manager’s ability to map the other person;s culture with respect to his or her own.
There are three skills important to effective communication in a cross-cultural setting: preparing, decentering and recentering.

Prepare

Preparing is about setting the ground for communication. The most important place to set the ground is in one’s own mind. Two attitudes are especially predictive of effective communication: motivation and confidence. Motivation is having the will to communicate across a cultural boundary both to be understood and to understand others. The confidence part of preparing is to believe that it is possible to overcome any barriers and communicate effectively.
These attitudes may sound simple to control, but their manifestation is complicated by some psychological tendencies we all have. They are inherent to our nature and normally serve us well, but tend to slip us up in cross-cultural interaction. More specifically, we tend to assume:
The other person sees the situation the same way as we do.
The other person is making the same assumptions as we are.
The other person is ( or should be ) experiencing the same feelings as we are.
The communication situation has no relationship to past events.
The other person’s understanding is ( or should be ) based on our own logic, not their feelings.
If a problem occurs, it is the other person who is the one who has the ‘problem’ or does not understand the logic of the situation.
Other cultures are changing and becoming, or want to become, more like our culture and, therefore, the other person is becoming more like us.

Decenter

Decentering is actively pushing yourself away from your own “center” and moving into the mind of the other person to send messages in a way the other will understand, and to listen in a way that allows you to understand them from their own point of view. The fundamental idea of decentering is empathy: feeling and understanding as another person does.
There are two main elements to decentering. The first is perspective taking, which is the skill of being able to see things from the other person’s point of view to the extend that you can speak and listen that way. The second is explaining without blame. When problems in communication do occur, it is critical that one blames the other in a personal way, but that all parties seek an explanation in the situation- the differences in initial starting assumptions.

Recenter

The final step to effective communication is recentering, or establishing a common reality and agreeing on common rules. Like the other elements, establishing a common reality is easier said than done. But it is much easier to see the need to do so, if one is aware of the types of differences between your own values and those of others.

Integrating to Manage and Build on the Differences

Building Participation

To realize the benefits of different perspectives and ideas ( the latent possibilities among the multicultural membership of a group ), it is necessary to express the ideas. Not all the cultures are equally predisposed to offer their ideas openly. People from cultures with a strong hierarchical orientation, for example, are not likely to put forth their ideas in a group containing a direct superior or a higher-status person. In contrast, people from individualistic cultures are more likely to assert their ideas. The first challenge for a multicultural group, then, is to ensure that all the ideas are heard.

Resolving Disagreements

As more ideas from various viewpoints are expressed, there is an increasing likelihood that there will be disagreements. The way these conflicts are handled, then, becomes the next cross-cultural challenge. Even the way conflict gets expressed, quite apart from how it gets resolved, varies in different cultural traditions. In many cultures it is deemed inappropriate to express conflict openly.

Building on Ideas

Even if the mapping framework is well understood, the communication skills are well developed, and participation and conflict issues are managed effectively, there is still a key component to realizing the potential of a multicultural group, namely, moving forward and build in the ideas. The main idea is to encourage the exploration of ideas with the conscious attempt to invent new ideas, to build on the ideas initially surfaced.

posted by mira @ 12:26 PM