Intercultural communication

Introduction:

Intercultural communication is key for many firms to be successful in their respective markets. Every firm has employees belonging to a different background or ethnicity, multi-cultural workforce will allow the organizations to be encouraging of different employees regardless of their culture or race. It has been proven by many studies that a diverse workforce will help the organizations reach its objectives and goals of the future. Not only the objectives would be accomplished but the workforce would accept different cultures and would interact with each other to complete a given task before the due date. The diversity in culture in an organization would promote increasing communication among the workforce, through a rigorous interaction it would be easy for the employees to work with each other. This report presents a brief overview of the term intercultural communication, workforce diversity and the advantages of diversity in the workplace.

Intercultural communication:

The term intercultural communication is referred to as “communication between individuals from different national cultures” (Croucher, Sommier & Rahmani, 2015, p. 71). It has been observed that there is a significant impact of culture on communication in the workplace as well as with the corporate business in some other culture. Moreover, there is a misunderstanding in the smaller firms among the supervisors that the communication in organizations is believed to be collective and not influenced by cultural differences (Kvantaliani & Klimina, 2011). However, there actually is an impact of culture on the communication of the workplace. This is presented by Moran, Harris and Moran (2007, p.4) where they state that “t the root of the issue, we are likely to find communication failures and cultural misunderstandings”. Intercultural communication is important for the workplace because it helps the colleagues to understand each other better and solve the business tasks together to achieve the organization goals. Furthermore, researches have suggested that workplace diversity is the key factor that upholds intercultural communication in the organizations. For a company to accomplish its aims and objectives the superiors must understand the notion of cultural dimension which would be required in interacting with others (Hunley, Chakraborty & MacDonald, 2018). Geert Hofstede refers to cultural dimension as “the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another” (Hofstede, 1980, p. 5).

Workplace Diversity:

This era is all about globalization in which people from all the world can connect in an instant with the use of technology, individuals with different culture and ethnicities work together in an organization to achieve the organizational goals of a firm. Diversification is present in every sector all around the world, the firms in different countries are now recognizing the implications of workplace diversity on the firm (Saxena, 2014). The term workplace diversity refers to “human characteristics that make people different from one another” (Gomez-Mejia, Balkin & Cardy, 2007, p. 119). Incorporation of workplace diversity is crucial in the organizational goals and objectives, through this there is no discrimination of any kind and does not have a toxic environment in the workplace that helps the company to accomplish their objectives. The reason behind the inclusion is not only attainment of the organizational objectives but also the safety that the workplace provides to the employees as well as the corporation’s growth in the industry (Hudson Jr, 2014).