Cross Cultural Management: Reflection on Non-Verbal Communication

Running Head: CROSS CULTURAL MANAGMENT
Cross cultural management
Reflection
Student Name
[Pick the date]

CROSS CULTURAL MANAGMENT 1
Introduction
Communication plays one of the most important roles in the completion of any task.
Communication is mainly of three types verbal, written and non-verbal. All three types of
communication are very important on the global level (Zeki, 2009). After a lot of exploration and
experience, I came to know that I am very weak in my non- verbal communication. Non-verbal
communication is that type of communication which is expressed through body postures, facial
expression, cues, and eye gaze. In this, facial expression is considered as universal expression all
over the world (Forceville, 2009). Many times I have this feeling that my non-verbal
communication is very bad. I often find myself trapped in a very uncomfortable situation in most
of the cases.
One of my bad experiences was in college where our team had to work on one task. Our team
consists of five members and all of the members were from different culture. While working on
the task, I used my non-verbal communication to convey my opinion without any wrong
intention (ICAS, 2019). But to my surprise, I unintentionally made my two teammates
uncomfortable because of my nonverbal expression because it generated different meaning for
them. As a result of this, we were not able to complete our task on time and whole team blamed
me for this outcome.
Reviewing my non-verbal communication from different prospect
I have faced numbers of bad experience related to my non-verbal communication while
interacting with people from different background. My first bad experience related to my non-
verbal communication happened in student meeting. In my culture, loud pitch or sound is
generally considered as a symbol of sincerity but to my surprise, it was considered as the symbol
of aggressive attitude and display ignorance (Cheshin, Rafaeli and Bos, 2011). In this situation,
my intention was to display my sincerity towards the meeting. But the result was just opposite, I
was perceived as the person who thinks that I am better than others and do not consider others
opinion valid for the meeting. In addition, I was perceived as a symbol of Hitler who wants to
suppress other opinion by putting my opinion over others in the form of aggression.
Another bad experience related to my non-verbal communication was in class, where one of the
girls who were from different culture feels offended because of me. There were events going on
in my college and everyone had to take part in the event. For this purpose, I interacted with one
girl who was from different culture regard her participation (Geng, 2011). In various culture,
maintaining eye contact with other persons while interacting is considered as one of the symbols
of confidence and gives value to the conversation. But to my surprise, while having a
conversation with that girl I was not able to maintain proper eye contact (Little et al., 2015). As a
result of this, she suddenly started to display different mode and left the conversation in the mid.
I was very surprised by this kind of behaviour because I have not experienced such kind of