In my last post, I talked about how and why effective communications are important in teamwork. There are many aspects of communication and in this post I am going to talk about intercultural and interpersonal communication in a team and what are the observations that I have seen when working in an intercultural team.
Instead of defining the terms intercultural and interpersonal separately, I believe that in the context of communication in a team; interpersonal communication in an intercultural setting is what we are looking for. To be able to communicate effectively and personally between people of different cultures should be the goal that we are aiming for.
Till now, I do have some experiences in working with people of different cultures. In schools, working places, and in the army, are places where I have the opportunities to work with people of different cultures. In the army, I had worked with people from Bahrain, India and also China.
I am glad that despite the cultural differences between us, we did work well together. However, there are many places where this can be improved on. In my opinion, when working with people of different cultures, the first thing that we need to do, is to put away assumptions.
Assumptions are very detrimental to team communications, especially if the team is made up of people of different cultures. When unfavourable situations arise, we must not shift our anger and frustrations towards blaming the others just because they are of a different culture, having the impression, “is this how THEY always do things?” There are indeed times when this thought came to my mind when working with the team in army. These assumptions eventually created more misunderstandings and prejudices against each other and team performance dropped greatly.
I believe that we should learn to tolerate uncertainties and temper our own communication style, seek clarifications and start listening by paying more attention to team members of different culture groups and not always jumping to conclusions. I shall end my post by mentioning some interesting examples that I found online below.
1.In the US, a firm, short handshake indicates self-confidence and (heterosexual) masculinity. A limp handshake by a man can be interpreted (usually wrongly) as a sign of homosexuality or wimpiness. But in most parts of Africa, a limp handshake is the correct way to do it. Furthermore, it is common in Africa for the handshake to last several minutes, while in the US a handshake that is even a few seconds too long is interpreted as familiarity, warmth and possibly sexual attraction.
2.In Britain, men do not look at women on the streets. The French do. Recently, a French public figure mentioned in a speech that the Brits are all gay -- the evidence was their lack of overt interest in women.
Extracted from http://www.analytictech.com/mb021/cultural.htm
5 comments:
Hi Jason,
A very relevant opinion which I feel it should be highlighted and for everyone to take note of, is removing of baseless assumption when cooperating with people of different backgrounds. It's some food for thought, really..
This time round, you described your personal experiences of working in a multinational team, mixed with people from different cultural backgrounds. I am a firm believer of personal insights, as they are more valuable than any definitions off the dictionary, in my honest opinion. The army experience is a valid example as we men learnt to work together under tough conditions, and are somewhat forced to cooperate with people from various backgrounds, just too bad if you happen to be a racist.
Nice examples found on the web regarding differences in a simple action across the globe. You are improving, keep it up!
Brandon
Hi Jason,
I like the way you link your previous blog entry to the current blog entry. It certainly has a ‘blog’ type of feeling and keeps your readers wanting to read your future blog entries.
I agree with you that we need to put aside our assumptions towards other cultures when working as a team. It is better not to assume things and always try to communicate everything as clearly as possible.
However, there are some parts of your blog entry that I do not really understand. What do you mean by “tolerate uncertainties and temper our own communication style”.
It will be better if you can briefly describe one of your personal experiences from working with people from other cultures. Alternatively, you may want to use one of the examples you found online and explain what are culture and the fundamentals of effective communication.
Nevertheless, you have done well for this blog entry. Good job and keep it up!
Li Hua
Hi Jason,
I agree with your view that we should aim to communicate effectively to people of different culture. I agree that assumptions can be harmful to a team, especially when working in a team with people of different cultures. As you mentioned, the first thing that we should do is to not jump into conclusions and let our emotions take over our logic and reasoning. However, I firmly believe that we should take further actions, so that we can communicate better and prevent unnecessary misunderstandings from taking place.
One of the more obvious steps that we should take is to learn more about their culture. We could read up more about the culture of our team members, or ask them more about their culture. This will enable us to see things in their perspective, and understand them better, which is the next step that we should take. By putting ourselves in their shoes, we will better understand how they make their decisions and how they reach their conclusions. Therefore, when interacting with people of other culture, I believe these are steps that we should take.
Lastly, I feel that you did not fully answer the question, which is to describe an intercultural scenario that you observed. Instead, you gave a rather brief example, which I feel that did not really describe the scenario you observed.
Leonard (C06)
Hi Jason,
You did a great job in linking the previous post and the current one, showing us how the two topics are actually intertwined and connected.
I also feel that this post is much more concise and focused than the last post. Great job. I see more reasons and justifications provided for the feelings involved in your personal experience.
An insight I gleaned from your post is that what most people do in cultural settings are jumping to conclusions and stereotyping the different cultures. As you said, this can severely affect the group dynamics as many misunderstandings are developed this way.
Your last paragraph is also a good summary on what people should do to effectively avoid conflicts due to intercultural misunderstanding.
Looking forward to your next post.
Keep up the good work! (:
Cherlia.
Hi Jason,
The fact that you directly linked the concepts of effective communication and teamwork with intercultural communication at the start of the post allows everyone to see how these concepts work together and that they built upon each other. This strengthens the point you were trying to make and convinces the reader that it is true.
I agree that the first thing to do when meeting people of other cultures is to not make any assumptions (especially negative ones). It does not benefit either party and thus one should always approach intercultural interactions with an open mind. In addition, you also highlighted that although we may get angry over the vast differences in two different cultures, perhaps to the point where they even contradict each other, it serves no purpose to blame each other. Instead we should practice cultural awareness and think about why they would do certain things in such a manner, in order to better understand them.
I found your final examples very relevant and interesting as well. However, perhaps they could be shifted to the middle of the post and the conclusions be drawn later to create a bigger impact.
I found it an entertaining and informative read. Please continue to create more of such posts.
Regards
Kimberly
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