Barriers to Intercultural Communication

This report discusses the factors that hinder intercultural communication in the workplace, including organization behavior, norms and values, and underlying assumptions. It also explores the relationship between culture and language and how they impact communication. The barriers to effective intercultural communication include ethnocentrism, prejudice, and language barriers.

Barriers to intercultural communication 1
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Barriers to intercultural communication: 2
Barriers to Intercultural Communication
Over the years small businesses are growing
rapidly and they are opening their branches outside
their country, therefore, employing the works outside
their countries hence forming a diversified workforce.
This intermingling will result in the cross-cultural
diversity which interns lead to cross-cultural
communication. In this report am going to base my
discussion on the study that was conducted in Malaysia
at companies that deal with the electronic gadgets that
are located at the Northern Peninsular. The agenda of
this comprehensive study was to come up with the
factors that hinder intercultural communication in the
workplace (Aneas and Sandin, 2009). In any workplace
where different cultures are working together, there are
various levels of the company’s culture. These culture
levels include;
The organization behavior is the first thing that
the newcomer or else a visitor will have to notice before
going to other things. Some of these things that the

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visitor will see include the mission and vision of the
organization as well as the logo of the organization.
According to Xiaoming and Junchen, (2012) the
organization behavior will constitute the observable
patterns of behavior as well as the external show of the
culture which may be a perk that is provided by the top-
level managers. Also, some notable features of a certain
behavior may be regarded as a longevity, for example,
organizational myths.
The second level of cultural level in the
workplace is the norms and values. This includes what
the top level managers command, the reason as to why
the condition is the way it is as per now as well as why it
should be like that. These values and norms determine
the behavior but these behaviors may not be seen
directly (Fayolle et al, 2010). In the organization, there
might be a big difference between the written or the
stated and those values that are operational. These
values and norms may be manifested via the attitude as
well as those behaviors that are accepted and almost

Barriers to intercultural communication: 4
every work adopt them. The organization philosophy
and norms make up the values.
Finally, the underlying assumption makes up
the three level of culture in an organization. The
company’s underlying assumption usually is gotten from
the values till are taken for granted and they extinct. To
cut the statement short, it is what the employees
believe and work toward achieving it.
Relationship between culture and language
Kramsch, (2013) argued that language and
culture are closely related in that they simultaneously
change at the same time because people pass on their
culture via the use of their language. Also, we are
directed by the language we speak to determine our
own culture. From the case study in order to have an
effective communication of information in an
organization, there must be an effective channel that
allows passage of information to all members in the
organization to prevent conflicts between the
workmates. Some of the issues that were identified in

Barriers to intercultural communication: 5
the study were misunderstanding and misinterpretation
of information among the employees which were
brought about by cultural and language diversity. In
most cases, people of one culture may think that the
culture of other people may be strange mainly because
they do not share the same language, therefore, they
cannot conceive other people culture.
Barriers of intercultural communication.
In many organizations, managers are faced with
the problem of handling workers that are from different
countries as well as different social background. This
problem could be caused by one of the following factors
that are as a result of barriers to effective intercultural
communication within the organization.
Firstly, in the study, it showed that
ethnocentrism is one of the factors that breakdown the
intercultural communication. In general, ethnocentrism
is a situation where ones see their culture to be
superior over other people’s culture. This view of other
people culture as inferior comprises a variety of

Barriers to intercultural communication: 6
assumption of referring certain culture as being morally
on the right path and being good in every situation.
When it happens that these two people are to interact
and work together one party will always fail to
acknowledge the ideas of the other party and may try to
solve a problem in their own ways (Samovar, et al,
2014). For example countries such as China uses high
management distances strategy whereas countries such
as Sweden like to be at low power distance orientation.
Therefore, when managers from these two countries
come to work together there will always a
dissatisfaction.
Secondly, prejudice acts as a barrier to effective
intercultural communication. Generally, prejudice
means have a negative attitude on the bases of
ethnicity, different religion as well as different
languages. Lewicki, et al, (2011) argued that when
people from one culture interact in the workplace with
the people from the different culture they mainly face
prejudice. Therefore inability of interaction as well as
communication results in a pre-judgment that is passed

Barriers to intercultural communication: 7
in a cross-cultural setting. For example, there is a
prejudice that those employees that are employed from
developing countries may be deemed to be
incompetent in their work. This prejudice within the
organization brings about communication breakdown.
Lastly, the language barrier is another factor
that acts as a barrier to cross-cultural communication.
Language enhances the exchange of ideas and
information between two or more parties. If the two
parties are from different cultures, therefore, the
language barrier will come in place. In order to do away
with language barriers, companies have adopted English
as a language that will be used in every organization.
According to recent research, cultural
differences in many organizational has increased over
time as result globalization all over the world (Martin,
2014). Organizations that have employees coming from
different cultural diversity has an advantage of retaining
the working and gifted workers hence increasing the
output of the organization. Also, the company will

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benefit as a result of people from different culture
combining their ideas and can solve a problem at hand
using a variety of which very layer to find from people
coming from the same culture (Okoro, 2012). The only
disadvantage is that a lot of resources and time is
consumed before arriving at an agreement.

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References
Aneas, M.A. and Sandín, M.P., 2009, January.
Intercultural and cross-cultural communication
research: Some reflections about culture and qualitative
methods. In Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum:
Qualitative Social Research (Vol. 10, No. 1).
Fayolle, A., Basso, O. and Bouchard, V., 2010. Three
levels of culture and firms’ entrepreneurial orientation:
A research agenda. Entrepreneurship and Regional
Development, 22(7-8), pp.707-730.
Kramsch, C., 2013. Culture in foreign language teaching.
Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research, 1(1),
pp.57-78.
Lewicki, R.J., Saunders, D.M., Minton, J.W., Roy, J. and
Lewicki, N., 2011. Essentials of negotiation. Boston, MA:
McGraw-Hill/Irwin.

Barriers to intercultural communication: 10
Martin, G.C., 2014. The effects of cultural diversity in
the workplace. Journal of Diversity Management
(Online), 9(2), p.89.
Okoro, E., 2012. Cross-cultural etiquette and
communication in global business: Toward a strategic
framework for managing corporate expansion.
International journal of business and management,
7(16), p.130.
Samovar, L.A., Porter, R.E., McDaniel, E.R. and Roy, C.S.,
2014. Intercultural communication: A reader. Cengage
Learning.
Xiaoming, C. and Junchen, H., 2012. A literature review
on organization culture and corporate performance.
International Journal of Business Administration, 3(2),
pp.28-37.