Intercultural Communication - Essay Example

Many organizations hire individuals from different countries to serve in different capacities within their ranks. One challenge that employees face in such organizations is understanding people with backgrounds that are different from theirs (Wang & Li, 2007). In such an environment, employees need to develop skills that enable them to become successful and effective intercultural communicators as they engage their colleagues in communication and as they interact at the workplace. Communication is one of the major components of effectiveness at a work place, the reason being that without effective communication, there are high chances of distortion in the message.

This tenet affects the outcome of an instruction or direction and increases chances of poor performance. However, cultural differences have the potential to create considerable difficulty in intercultural communication since culture has a strong effect on beliefs, values, nonverbal behavior, language, worldviews and relationships with other people (Chitakornkijsil, 2010). For the management, intercultural communication facilitates the exchange of meanings between them and other managers from other countries.

Managers who have subordinates from different countries working under them face the challenge of encoding and decoding messages in the correct way to ensure that the message is interpreted correctly. Every international manager qualifies as a communicator in the sense that they do or say conveys essential information to someone or a group of people within or outside the organization (Lauring, 2011). In a world where no country is self-sufficient in terms of resources, cultures and markets increasingly converge.

For an organization to record considerable success in today’s business environment, it has to adopt cross-cultural teamwork and collaboration (Samovar, McDaniel &