Course Overview

Estimated Time to Complete: 1.5 Hours

The globalization of communication has brought with it opportunities to conduct business with people from all over the world. Inevitably, this means interactions and relationships between people who are culturally different. This is known as cross-cultural communication.

A simple definition of a culture is a group of people who share a common set of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, and who communicate through common language or symbols.

The culture in which people are socialized influences the manner in which they work, socialize, and interact with others.

If you want to understand and communicate effectively with people of different cultures, it's imperative that you understand how culture affects communication.

Consider the following situations that might happen at a workplace. Do you think these issues signal a problem?

• an employee refuses to make eye contact with the supervisor when they're working together
• a contract has been signed, yet the customer requests additional negotiation
• a team leader is habitually late for meetings
• a customer refuses to answer direct questions about what she requires from a vendor, and
• an employee doesn't contribute to team meetings

If you answered "yes" or "no" to any of the examples on the previous page, you're probably basing your opinion on the expectations you've developed from your own cultural experiences. But the facts are that each of these business situations may be perfectly acceptable, depending on the culture you work within.

There are many different ways that people of different cultures give and receive information. They communicate in a variety of ways – through talk, silence, expression, emphasis, and gesture. People from different cultures place different emphasis on these methods, and have distinct expectations as to how each should be used to communicate, and what the message is that each conveys.

The best way to understand intercultural communication is to be aware of the five elements of the communication process.

The elements are sender, encoding, channel, decoding, and receiver. To communicate effectively, you'll need to understand the cultural context influencing each of these elements.

Sender

• The sender is the person who has something to communicate.

Encoding

• Encoding is putting the communication into a form that can be transmitted, such as the written or spoken word.

Channel

• The channel is the medium used to transmit the message from sender to receiver.

Decoding

• Decoding is receiving and translating the message into meaning.

Receiver

• The receiver is the person who accepts and translates the message into meaning.

How a message is sent and received is influenced by the cultural context. A message in any form originating from a sender in one culture and transmitted to a receiver in another culture will be influenced by many variables that will determine the ultimate success of the communication.

In this course, you will learn about the tools you need to make sure effective and appropriate communication takes place when you're in cross-cultural environments.

You'll learn about cultural context, and how this affects the meaning in the messages people send and receive.

You'll also cover speaking and writing in cross-cultural environments, and learn the guidelines for giving presentations for a cross-cultural audience.