Intercultural Communication free essay sample

Employers and employees should work together to understand the different cultures that coexist within the work organization. As stated by Allwood J. (Ed. ) (1985) â€Å"Since the basic difficulty in intercultural communication is the differences that exist between the sender’s and receiver’s cultural background and way of communicating, the first action to reduce the risks of misunderstanding would be to gather an informed insight into the differences and similarities which should not be ignored as they can form a general human base that can be used to solve some of the difficulties in interpersonal communication. Thus understanding the diversity not only helps to overcome intercultural misunderstandings but helps also to improve interpersonal communication within the work organization 6. 2. 3Be flexible Employers and employees should also learn to be flexible and develop skills needed to be used in intercultural communication. As stated by Allwood J. (Ed) (1985) †Å"The most far-reaching goal to achieve good intercultural communication is to give people the ability and skill to live in other cultures and to exercise other communication patterns. We will write a custom essay sample on Intercultural Communication or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page For this type of communication, training in the language of the new culture is clearly of the greatest importance. Thus learning the new language is learning intercultural communication as we will be speaking the language of others from different cultural backgrounds compared to us. † This means that we must be susceptible to accept change in the lingua franca of the organization or even abiding by new organizational policies that encourage intercultural communication and understanding. 6. 2. 4 Develop empathy Empathy literally means â€Å"feeling into† another’s feelings with one’s own, vicariously, and attempting to achieve some i-thou congruence. Empathy is multi-faceted, involving cognitive (thinking), affective (feeling), and communication component: Cognitively , the empathic person take the perspective of another person, and in so doing strives to see the world from the other’s point of view. Affectively, the empathy person experience the emotion of another, he or she feels the other’s experiences. Communicatively, the empathic individual signals understanding and concern through verbal and nonverbal cues (Bell, 1981). Thus through the development of empathy we can manage to understand why a certain person acts a certain way when faced with problems caused my intercultural misunderstandings and such. 6. 2. 5Management training. The traditional disciplines of management do not lend themselves to knowledge management and should be revised so that the knowledge based competence of a corporation can be managed effectively and efficiently. Traditional notions about strategy, human resource management, finance and marketing should be re-examined and revised in order to manage knowledge for competitive advantage (Ichijo and Nonaka, 2007:7). I endeavour to review their contributions and indicate how they contribute to our understanding of management theory and practice of management training in communication skills. They must interact with each other to transcend their own boundaries and as a result change themselves. Organizations don’t just solve problems, they create and define them (Nonaka et al. , 2000:3).