How can regional cultures affect communication

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Cheeky Aussies Australians have a unique sense of humor, which may seem cheeky or irrelevant to outsiders. Assertive Koreans South-Korean reporters are usually not shy and can be quite aggressive in asking for information on market strategies, profits and revenues, and proprietary information.

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News direct to your inbox. View Style:. Innovator 25 Changemakers In The Americas Aarti Shah 13 Oct We asked this year's innovators for their perspectives on the future of the office. Spend time on face-to-face relationship building before switching to virtual communication, and make sure to include all team members in decision making at all stages of the project. As with any aspect of business, things are made easier with good communication.

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Home All 6 examples of cultural differences in business communication. Business Culture 6 examples of cultural differences in business communication January 22, Gill Atkinson. Managing emails and phone calls Telephone conferences can be very effective in improving business communication and cooperation within international companies. Things will go much more smoothly once everybody feels informed and involved.

Presentations Consider how people from different countries approach their goals. Meetings and how to facilitate them Big events like international sales meetings can quickly become disorganized and lose direction if communication breaks down between groups from each country. Not understanding whether your workplace communication style is high-context or low-context could cause a lot of problems.

An American and a Chinese, for example, would take-away a different message from the same conversation. Not recognising the difference in styles could be cumbersome in building relationships, agreements, and even providing feedback.

An American manager would feel comfortable answering a question asked at face value, but a Chinese manager would prefer to take into consideration information left unsaid, such as the team that this person works in, their proximity with the issue, and any underlying problems associated with their question.

Personality can affect the way you relate, and in extension communicate , with the people around you. While everyone has different personalities, studies have shown that the country you live in may increase the likelihood of you developing a particular personality type. The most widely used model for personality - the Big Five - is explored in an extensive study by Robert McCrae and 79 collaborators around the world.

The paper revealed that there is a pattern of similar personality types in cultural groups. For example, Brazilians, French-Swiss, and the Maltese are the most extroverted while Nigerians, Moroccans, and Indonesians ranked as the most introverted. The average Indonesian worker would feel more comfortable giving feedback in one-on-one conversations but might struggle to speak up in a group setting where the average Brazilian would thrive.

For example, German-speaking Swiss, Danes and Germans scored the highest for openness to experience, while the lowest scoring on average were the Hong Kong Chinese, Northern Irish, and Kuwaitis.

In these cultures, nepotism is seen as subjective and likely to protect less qualified workers through familial intervention. By contrast, it would seem anywhere from mildly to highly inappropriate to suggest to members of many Arabic, central African, Latin American, or southern European cultures to skip over hiring relatives to hire a stranger. For people in these cultures, nepotism both fulfills personal obligations and ensures a predictable level of trust and accountability.

Similarly, the nature of praise and employee motivation can be socially determined, for different cultures have settled upon a wide array of employee reward systems, each of which reflect the social histories and values of those cultures. Finally, it is often difficult to rid business communication of a judgmental bias when social organization varies markedly.

For example, those from the United States may find it difficult to remain neutral on cultural class structures that do not reflect American values of equality. For instance, the socially determined inferior role of women in much of the Islamic world, or of lower castes in India—to name just two—may puzzle or anger Western citizens. Nevertheless, if the Western business-person cannot eliminate the attendant condemnation from his or her business communication, then he or she cannot expect to function effectively in that society.

An individual may personally believe that a country's social system is inefficient or incorrect. Nevertheless, in the way that individual conducts business on a daily basis, it is necessary to work within the restraints of that culture to succeed.

One may choose not to do business with people from such a culture, but one cannot easily impose one's own values on them and expect to succeed in the business arena.

Different cultures often view the distribution of authority in their society differently. Views of authority in a given society affect communication in the business environment significantly, since they shape the view of how a message will be received based on the relative status or rank of the message's sender to its receiver. In other words, conceptions of authority influence the forms that managerial and other business communications take. In working with cultures such as Israel and Sweden, which have a relatively decentralized authority conception or small "power distance," one might anticipate greater acceptance of a participative communication management model than in cultures such as France and Belgium, which generally make less use of participative management models, relying instead on authority-based decision making.

Among the most markedly varying dimensions of intercultural communication is nonverbal behavior. Knowledge of a culture conveyed through what a person says represents only a portion of what that person has communicated. Indeed, body language, clothing choices, eye contact, touching behavior, and conceptions of personal space all communicate information, no matter what the culture. A prudent business person will take the time to learn what the prevailing attitudes are in such areas before conducting businesses in an unfamiliar culture or with a representative of that culture.

As business has turned more and more to an integrated world market to meet its needs, the difficulties of communicating at a global level have become increasingly widespread. Lack of understanding deriving from ethnocentrism or ignorance of culturally based assumptions erroneously believed to be universal can readily escalate to unproductive conflict among people of differing cultural orientation. This may occur on the domestic front as well. With the increasing numbers of immigrants to the U.

In combination with a growing emphasis on global markets and an interdependent and internationalized economy, the need for dealing with intercultural differences and cross-cultural communication barriers has grown.