Intercultural Communication in the Workplace Paper
University of Phoenix
Cultural Diversity / SOC 315
Mary Hamilton

July 27, 2006

Week Three

Intercultural Communication in the Workplace

Elaine Winters, a noted subject matter expert on Cultural differences and awareness says, "Few people seem to feel the need to truly face the underlying issues that cloud even the simplest of delicate, and frequently confusing, cross-cultural interactions." There is no doubt as to the many cultural groups around the world with different patterns of behavior, values, and rules. In the workplace, not establishing intercultural communication can be a very expensive mistake. This paper will review a scenario in which intercultural
This is especially true when we may feel vulnerable due to uncertainty. So the mind creates its own set of rules or generalizations – which may be based on some surface realities and patterns – but which fail to account for real experience and individual variation. What's more, since we may feel threatened, the human mind can presume negative motives or draw negative inferences from the generalizations we create/observe, which forms then forms the basis of prejudice."

This being said, there are other elements in this situation that have relevance such as Maslow's hierarchy of needs (affection or love), implicit personality theory, Schutz's needs for affection, for control, disconfirmed expectations, selective perception as influenced by motivation, stereotyping, and assuming. The assumption that the other person possesses both the knowledge of the linguistic forms of communicative action as well as the body of knowledge to which they refer may be false. Misunderstandings on the level of the message, the propositional meaning based on the content (both verbal and nonverbal), and still more on the level of the metamessage, the implied social meaning which is usually only indirectly expressed - i.e. the assessment of the social relationship - (Bateson 1972) are a frequent consequence.

Strategies
A thing to note is people are programmed differently and have no, or at best, a superficial knowledge of each