Friday, January 3, 2014

Communication - Barriers 3

In the last byte, we looked at how status difference could act as a barrier to communication. In today's byte, we look at cultural diversity as a barrier to communication.

In the current world of globalization, where teams work across time-zones cultural diversity is a major barrier to communication that needs to be recognize and addressed. The difference in cultural values and patterns of behavior lead to a lot of confusion and act as barriers to communication. Given that there are also on-site projects that need to be executed, it so often happens that the outsider working in a foreign culture could find some of the habits extremely confusing and may be bizarre some times.

Another important aspect that one needs to be aware of in the same context is the existence of cultural stereotypes (we shall discuss about stereotypes elsewhere, but discuss about this in the context of barrier to communication here). When one uses stereotypes to view people of other culture, many a times the individual differences within the other culture blurs out. This could mislead an individual to communicate inappropriately with people from other culture.

The means to break this barrier - i.e. a gateway to communication is increasing the awareness of cultural diversity and being sensitive to the culture's uniqueness. Another gateway could be to develop and acquire guide, map or a beacon to understand the interaction with people from other culture.

No comments:

Post a Comment