The Importance Of Cross-Cultural Communication

With globalization, cross cultural communication is taking more and more importance in companies. Indeed, freedom of movement of workers and the installation of multinational companies all over the world bring different cultures to meet. Mostly since the cold war ended and the developping countries are taking more and more importance in the world economy.

That is why companies, in order to be effective, need nowadays managers well prepared to handle cross cultural communication. To supply this demand, the cross cultural communications are studied by specialists from different fields like anthropology, cultural studies, etc. Thanks to these studies, managers now have some keys to handle perfectly a multicultural team.

First of all, cross cultural communication plays a role in many different fields. Indeed, the first barrier is the language. People from different countries most of the time do not speak the same language and having a translator

In this situation, he has to transmit information from within the organization to outsiders, sometimes for financial purposes (such as managing the values of the companies’ shares). By doing so, he gives important information to outsiders and that requires from the manager to have created a web of connections between offices and workers in the workplace. Because not informing properly your workers before informing the public (press mostly) is the greatest treason you can do to people from interdependant cultures. In western countries, it is not rare to learn things about your own company in the press, we even had many cases of people learning they are fired on the press. If it is not appreciated, it is not that rare. While in asian countries, is it a situation you will not find, their collectivist culture does not tolerate to not inform everyone in the company about future decisions. This situation can kill the motivation of a team and therefore must be