Intercultural communication in business
Who we are?
We are the group of HKSJ which means Having Knowledgeable and Sensational Journal and also combined from the first letter of our English names. This is also the aim that we want to achieve. We want to write a blog which is knowledgeable and impressed others a lot. We hope we can do it in the near future.
Our group members are:
Harmony Leung
Hi, everyone. I’m Harmony, a year 2 student major in Global Business System Management. In fact, I like to meet new friends and chat with others, so that I think it is very important to know how to communicate with others in an efficient way, especially when I communicate with one who has different cultural background. I hope that I can improve my communication skill after study this course and everyone can learn something by visiting our blog. I’m looking forward to your comments which help us to improve. Thank you.K Wong
Hello. I am K, a GBSM student in year2. I like music and playing guitar so much. And I think music can be a common language in the world because we can know each others' thinking in the music. Hence, music actually can facilitates the intercultural communication. Besides, I hope everyone can get something in our blog. Thank you.
Seth Ng
Hello, nice to meet you all. I am Seth, year 1 GBSM student. I like playing basketball and listening to Hip-hop and R&B music. Moreover, meeting new friends around the world is so great but I know some culture difference have to be tackled. So, I hope all of us can learn from each other and reading our blog. Then, we can be as a nice friend to others. Please always come to visit us, you definitely will be impressed by our blog and learn something from here.Jeffrey Lee
Writing this blog is one of the assignments of a course which called Intercultural Communication for Business. In this blog, we will have some comments on this course or any other materials that relate to this course, e.g. how culture affects personal communication or business communication.
First of all, let us take a look of the following video~
What message do you get from this video?
Why there are cultural misunderstandings between different people in the video?
Is it all only because of different language?
Here, we would like to have some ideas on a blog related to “Intercultural Communication” and give some comments to the blog. The link of the website is http://mhafidz46.blogspot.com/.
Intercultural communications is not only about languages
At the beginning, the author has introduced the definition of the term “Intercultural Communication”, importance of this term, and how it affects the business field. The author has mentioned that many companies have some misunderstanding on this term or are not really familiar with this. Many companies think that Intercultural communication is just about the skill or ability of language. However, in author’s view, that’s not the truth. It should be more than language, something such as a variety of religious, social, ethnic, and technical backgrounds should also be concerned, and so that’s why many companies fail to deal with this issue.
Who is the author? Who will be interested? Is that you?
The author’s name is Mohd. Hafidz Hussien. He is a lecturer who is aged 63. And the viewership is people who are interested in intercultural communication such as students, his friends and his relatives.
The purpose of the blog…
Although the author doesn’t clearly mention his motivation of writing this article, we think that his motivation is to state out what intercultural communication really is, how intercultural communication would affect us in the business environment, and the right way to deal with this issue.
We need more Creativity and Innovation
When it comes to promoting the creativity and innovation of intercultural communication, our group deems it fails to do so. Because the blogger just defines the term “Intercultural Communication”, and explains the importance of it, i.e. mostly from textbooks rather than in his own opinions. It lacks the creativity and innovation. In addition, those tips mention in his blog are quoted from others. It has room to improve. We cannot see any impressive ideas or views in the blog. We like this blog because we can have a clear meaning of intercultural communication. It points out language is just one of the important elements of intercultural communication. Besides language, we should pay attention to religions, culture, social and ethnic backgrounds since these are also important components of an effective intercultural communication system. We think this blog is useful for us to understand intercultural communication concepts.
What really inspire us?
In fact, one thing that inspires us a lot is that people in different culture using different communication methods, not just because of different language, but also the different background, rules, norms etc. Western people prefer a direct communication and not to be silent at all time in the discussion, but Chinese are completely different. They want others indirectly response to their ideas even others disagree. So we should be aware of this. Respect each other and understand other’s cultures are what we should do to avoid any arguments triggering by culture shock. Moreover, intercultural communications is not only an expression, but also a sharper of cultural identities, so we should also pay attention to this.
What can be improved by the blogger?
We suggested that the blogger should share more of his perspectives, so he can inspire the readers more. Hence, the readers would be more willing to share their views by leaving some comments rather than just like reading an article about intercultural communication.
More about Intercultural communication...
The clickable link in the following is the other blog we found it is interesting: http://www.clintrogersonline.com/blog/2008/04/18/nobel-peace-prize-winner-shirin-ebadi-iran-children-law-violence-and-peace/.
We eventually chose this one because we do not have enough knowledge understanding of the concept of intercultural communication. As theme of our blog is intercultural communication in business, we should have basic knowledge and understanding of it. And all details of intercultural communication are given by the blog we have chosen. It also points out some useful tips such as underestimating the cultural differences in the communication would eventually lead to some conflicts. People who work in the multinational enterprise need to communicate with others who are in different culture. Hence, we should be aware of our non-verbal language during listening, prevent others from having a sense of alienation. This is one of the tips stated in the blog. Moreover, as these scenarios we will inevitably encounter in the future, our group deems those tips useful to us. And the blog has provided a lot of tips, which are about communicating with people in the business environment. Enjoy and have fun.
Thank you you guys
Thank you for all the good comments that you guys left us. We really appreciate that. All of you suggested us to add the subtitles, self-introduction of us, more pictures and clips. We all agree that what you guys suggested and think all of the feedback are reasonable, so in order to make the blog more interesting and complete, we make some changes according to your suggestions. We added the subtitles and insert more pictures and clips in our blog. The background of the blog has also changed which make the blog become more attractive, so you will feel more comfortable when reading our blog.
In addition, one of you had asked a good question: What solutions can be or something else as we cannot learn every culture to prevent such problem?
In our point of view, it is too difficult to eliminate all the problem arises from communication and even intercultural communication. What we try to do is to minimize the problem arises. We should try to learn as much culture as we can, respect each other and try not to do something what break the communication or lead to misunderstanding. By doing so, we could avoid having troubles during the communication. In other words, just try to learn more and know more others’ culture and make the communication in better way. Practice makes perfect. No one does things perfect at first time.
