Stereotypes In Intercultural Communication

Sometimes, deductive stereotypes occur whenever an assumption is made that abstract cultural generalizations are relevant to each individual culture in the organisation. According to Issa et al. (2015), though it is sensible to generalize that the Americans as a group that they are strongly individualistic than their Japanese counterparts, it can turn out to be a stereotype to assume make an assumption that each American is very individualistic, and therefore, the person with whom you are communicating is likely to be a deviant (Pate & Sharafa, 2015). This nevertheless, cultural generalizations should mainly be used when as working hypotheses that needs to be tested if they really work well, and if there is a need to modify them if they do not apply to a particular

According to Chaney and Martin (2011), the intercultural concept of adaptation is being understood more often. It is worth to note of the differences between adaptation and assimilation because in many cases, the terms are used inappropriately. The latter relates to the process leading to resocialisation and it aims at replacing person’s original worldview with a host culture whereas the latter leads to an expansion of one’s worldwide view to accommodate behavior as well as values that are relevant to a specific culture (Powell et al., 2002). For this reason, the assumed outcome of assimilation is becoming a new person while the result of cultural adaption is becoming a multicultural person. A multicultural person possesses some new aspects of culture that does not affect his or her original socialisation. As noted by Lustig and Koester (2010), the identity of issues revolving around adaptation are somehow complex, but their understanding (by women and men who discharge their managerial duties) is one of the new fields of intercultural