Intercultural Competence in Business

INTERCULTURAL
COMPETENCE IN
BUSINESS

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Where did Mark go wrong?.........................................................................................................1
Ways in which Mark can understand cross-cultural problem in a better manner.......................1
Use of intercultural theories to explain it and support your discussion.......................................2
Advice to Mark............................................................................................................................3
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................4

Where did Mark go wrong?
Each country has its own culture. This culture affects the way in which people
communicate with each other or build relationship with each other. Place where Mark was wrong
was that he used same way of communication or way of interaction that he used with his
employees back in America. This was one of the major problems because of which he was facing
all of those communication and trust issues with his employees in India. This can be explained
with the help of Anthropologist Edward Hall’s Intercultural communication theory. According to
Hall’s Intercultural communication theory Lewis, (2017) India is a high context cultural country
where people mainly relies on implicit and non-verbal communication more. Other than this
people of India rely more on background information of an activity more in order to complete the
task or activity in an appropriate manner. So, according to this theory Mark does not focus on
providing complete background information to their employees and does not focus on non-verbal
communication because of which he was not able to able to build trust within his employees and
he had to explain each and every thing in detail and was required to provide every minute detail
to his Indian employees. He did not focus on building relationship with his employees first
instead of this, he directly started to work with them because of which he was not able to gain his
employees trust.
Ways in which Mark can understand cross-cultural problem in a better manner.
This cross-cultural problem can be explained to Mark using Hofstede’s Cultural
Dimensions Theory and comparing culture of America and India. This comparison will help
Mark to understand difference in culture of America and culture of India in many different ways.
According to Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory as explained by Huang and Crotts, (2019).
Hofstede’s theory will help in explaining difference between culture of both India and America.
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