Acknowledgements of Intercultural Communication through Real Case Scenario

Under globalization, intercultural communication becomes an essential aspect, helping us to understand the attitude and behaviour of individuals having various cultures. However, communicating in a multicultural environment is never easy. This article discusses a real case scenario where cultural differences led to misunderstandings and conflicts. The author reflects on their weakness in recognizing cultural differences and develops an actionable plan to improve intercultural communication skills.

Acknowledgements of intercultural communication through the real
case scenario.
Under globalization, collaboration and interaction of people from diverse cultures emerge
prevalently (Azmi 2007). Thus, intercultural communication becomes an essential aspect, helping
us to understand the attitude and behaviour of individuals having various cultures (Yeke &
Semercioz 2016). However, communicating in a multicultural environment is never easy. Harzing
& Feely (2008) argued that the more culturally diverse team is, the higher possibility of
communication difficulties is. Since people act and behave favorably and comfortably to their
cultural values, traditions, and norms (Maity 2018), leading to the cultural misunderstanding.
Therefore, cultural misunderstanding is an unavoidable issue that individuals will face in a
multicultural environment (Andarab & Mahmoudi 2015).
Enrolling in the International Business Program, it is important for me to pay intensified attention to
intercultural communication, which will help me to connect and deliver information effectively to
diverse cultural friends and lecturers, as well as my future career working in a multicultural
workplace. Previously mentioned towards cultural conflicts, I was no exception. I could not avoid
facing misunderstanding my foreign friend’s behaviour in the Managing International Business
Responsibility (MIBR) course. I feel lucky after studying the Cross Cultural Management course
since I can acknowledge the importance of intercultural communication and it drove me to the
better perspectives of that real case scenario in the previous course.
My weakness in the MIBR course gave me an insightful reflection of myself in managing a cultural
diversity team. It was about being unable to recognize cultural differences. I was leading the team
of five, including me and two other friends of mine from different regions in Vietnam, and a pair of
American students. My happiness peaked at the beginning of the course. With diversity of cultures
in my team, I was confident to gather additional breadth of insights, perspectives and experiences,
facilitating the creation of new and better ideas for the last assignment (Rijamampianina 1996).
However, life is not like a dream. The arguments occurred when I aggressively distributed the tasks
for other members, and I misinterpreted when two American friends directly contributed their
opinions. Fortunately, we still fulfilled our outstanding assignment thanks to the empathy with our
mistakes and differences in culture. Thus, the MIBR course gave me not only the understanding of
responsibility in managing an international business, but also the experience of solving intercultural

misunderstandings.
Reflection on different perspectives
To have a deeper understanding of my weakness, I will describe my reflection from different
perspectives according to Eastern-Western culture.
Playing as team leader, I hosted meetings and task allocation. I was considering my ideas the most
important and allocating members’ tasks without asking if they were capable. Vietnamese members
listened to my allocation and did not ask for further requirements or negative reactions. Oppositely,
American members fiercely reacted to my “command” and criticized me for not respecting their
opinions. In the meeting, while my Vietnamese members had a friendly attitude, foreign members
attended and contributed under an aggressive and straightforward attitude, creating a discomforting
environment and members were hesitant in discussing. Eventually, after realizing we had different
cultural backgrounds (Eastern-Western culture), I was then understanding that different cultural
norms affect our behaviours. Because of a lack of intercultural communication skills, I didn’t fully
understand the attitude and behaviour of foreign members (Yeke & Semercioz 2016).
To illustrate, Vietnamese members follow the leader’s ideas without asking for further expectations.
They perceive leaders have greater power to make the optimal outcomes and members are afraid of
raising their voice to contribute ideas (Cox & Rowley 2014). So my friends imply I am the only
person who provides a specific direction. However, in Western culture, leaders are the ideas
collectors and instructors, not playing more crucially than the members. Members will come up
with creative ideas and play an extremely significant role in the meeting (Czarniawska-Joerges
1993). Still, with Eastern cultural norms, Nguyen (2011) argued that Vietnamese people use a gentle
and friendly tone of voice to avoid negative effects on relationships. Thus, with different cultural
backgrounds, it is understandable that we feel discomfort when Americans straightly contribute
their ideas.
Applying theories from CCM course to interpret weakness
Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov (2010) classifies culture into six distinguished dimensions which
have become a framework for comparing cultures (Appendix 1). In this case, the power distance
dimension of Hofstede’s model will analyze the weakness of cultural misunderstanding.

Power distance dimension refers to the degree that less powerful members accept unequal power
distribution (Hofstede & Minkov 2010). In comparison, Vietnam experiences significantly higher
power distance than America (Appendix 2). This means Vietnamese leaders play a significant role
in decision making, regardless of their members' opinions. Hence, under Vietnamese culture, it was
familiar for me and my friends when working in an unequal power environment, as the hierarchical
relations are natural within an organization (Child 2019). However, in low power distance cultures,
people perceive each other equally and have relative independence from their leaders (Pasa 2000).
Therefore, American members aggressively reacted to my allocation since they felt disrespectful.
The miscommunication between collectivist and individualist cultures caused conflicts. Vietnam
has a high collectivist culture (Appendix 2), meaning that it emphasizes the importance of groups
rather than individuals (Nguyen, Terlouw & Pilot 2005). Therefore, not to negatively affect the
group's performance, they maintain the harmony by avoiding direct criticism (Nguyen & Pham
2020). So when American members directly criticized me and other members fiercely, we felt
disrespected. Illustrating their manner by stating that America is a highly individualist culture,
which is opposite to Vietnamese (Appendix 2). Hence, Western members did not recognize that we
can consider their straightforward communication style as criticism and purposely affecting the
group’s performance in Vietnamese culture.
Therefore, under cultural misunderstanding, both of two cultures assume the other has a
disrespectful manner, leading to unexpected conflicts. Hence, through this issue, I recognized I was
very weak in recognizing the cultural differences. By facing this multicultural problem, it was the
lesson that I should have controlled my temper and had different perspectives whenever working in
a multilingual and multicultural team to avoid unexpected conflicts.
Action plan
The next step after recognizing my weakness is developing an actionable plan to transform my
weakness into my strengths and improve intercultural communication at universities and in the
workplace in the future.
As stated in the previous part, it is necessary to improve temper and have diversified perspectives
when working in multicultural teams. This means that my cultural intelligence (CQ), which is the
ability to effectively manage cultural diversity, should be enhanced. The research of Yeke &
Semercioz (2016) evidently validated that cultural intelligence has a positive influence on

intercultural communication competence. Nothing is better than self-learning. I will develop a
3-month CQ self-training plan based on the concept of the Cultural Intelligence framework of
Livermore (Figure 1).
Figure 1. The four dimensions of CQ (reproduced from Iskhakova & Ott 2020)
The first stage includes intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and self-efficacy. This stage will assist me
realize the need to adopt an individual's culture (Ward, Wilson & Fischer 2011). Therefore, I will do
the CQ test built by Early & Mosakowski (2004) (Appendix 3). In the second stage, I will provide
myself with sufficient information about behaviours affected by cultures, and improve the cognition
of the CQ dimension by revising the lecturer slides of the CCM course. In the third stage, I will
develop my strategy to effectively address cultural encounters. In this stage, I will self-reflect when
comparing my upcoming experience with my expectations. Last stage is related to the behavioural
dimension of CQ. I will re-evaluate after three previous steps by doing hypothetical situations
collected on the Internet to check whether I suit different cultural contexts and behaviours (Ang &
Van Dyne 2008).

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Appendix
Appendix 1. Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions (adapted from Hofstede, Hofstede & Minkov
2010)

Appendix 2. Comparison of Hofstede’s dimensions among United States and Vietnam (reproduced from
Hofstede Insights n.d.)

Appendix 3. The test of CQ (Earley & Mosakowski 2004)