Essay: Participatory Culture's Impact On Cross-Cultural Communication.

How Participatory Culture Has Transformed Cross-Cultural Communication?

Thesis statement: “An identification of skills of business communication necessary to gain higher positions in the management”

This essay covers a reflective practice aiming to acquire knowledge on how to conduct reflective essay on things that have already happened in the past. These things are beneficial in the context of gaining organizational competency and creating a database of knowledge that could assist people at the professional level (Lucas & Rawlins, 2015). The essay is significantly important in identifying the personal weaknesses and strengths as such practices produce an opportunity to look back on concerned areas of improvement and design an action plan to improve those areas. Improvements made to the personal career by adhering to mentioned procedures are the handful even in the professional field because professionals are always needed to work on their feedbacks. Working on feedbacks require to look back on everything from strategy making to making action plans for its implementation (Lucas & Rawlins, 2015). Evidently, the purpose of this essay is to enhance capabilities in a reflective writing and to produce ample information to assist and improve a professional career. The section that follows the introductory part identifies and explains one weekly concept of all ten activities being covered during the semester. This is followed by a section, which covers a literature review on the identified one weekly topic. In section three, the essay describes two of the topics being covered during the entire ten weeks. The last section is a conclusion to this essay where a brief summarization of the entire things discussed in this essay is covered.

Different concepts related to business communication were being covered during the different weeks of the semester. However, this section covers only one topic, which is more relevant to my work activities. Hence, I decided to go with the “Cross-Cultural Communication”. In Australia, there is a significant population of such people who originally belong to different countries (Ng & Metz, 2015). In such circumstances, it is, therefore, very difficult to effectively communicate with people from diverse cultural backgrounds. It is because of many reasons such as differences in voice modulation, which reflect the impact of one’s native country on his or her communication (Imhof et al., 2014). I have selected this topic to help me acquainted with a number of issues, which people generally face while working with people from different cultures. Non-verbal communication such as through e-mails or by any other means is not that challenging than it is speaking verbally with people from diverse cultures (Mavridis, 2015). The literature review section discusses the challenges of communicating in an intercultural environment. I personally want to groom myself in respect to communication generally practiced in business places. It is just to provide me an advantage of roaming everywhere around the world for doing jobs. It is not that people with no significant knowledge on intercultural communication do not travel but it is that they face challenges while discussing a project or sharing some information with their peers from different cultural backgrounds.

Literature review on Cross-Cultural Communication

According to Tombleson and Wolf, (2017), cultural difficulties can be classed into high-context cultures and low-context cultures. High-context means that there are huge cultural differences in ways people communicate with each other. On the other hand, low-context means a relatively low difference in cultures. Japanese, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean etc. have huge differences between their cultures. Hence, the level of challenge is also bigger when people from these regions communicate with each other. Australian and Scandinavians have a low difference between their cultures. Hence, the level of challenge of communication is relatively lower than in people from high-context cultures. Neuliep and Johnson, (2016) opine that ‘Face Negotiation Theory' provides a ground to the fact that how to communicate effectively with people from different cultures. As stated by Aslani, et al., (2016), culture has an impact on the facial expression that people develop under various circumstances such as for feelings of respect, status, honor, loyalty and connection. According to Jiang, et al., (2016), culture shapes into various desired identities under a particular situation.

As stated by Jenifer and Raman, (2015), there are a few barriers to the cross-cultural communication, which if not managed properly can affect the quality of communication between people of diverse cultures. Callahan and Humphries, (2016) identify linguistic as one of the potential barriers to effective business communication. Linguistic is a branch of study that deals with numerous questions surrounding the various cultural languages such as what are all the patterns of languages, what commonness they have between and more. Kiselev and Glozman, (2016) says that one who is very effective with the essentials of linguistic, he or she has the maximum capability to deal with culturally diverse people. Mavridis, (2015) states that non-verbal communication is pretty challenging considering that the difference in facial behaviors is impacts of types of cultures. According to Serrat, (2017), understanding of emotions can become difficult at times when people from two different cultures are into the communication.

 This section covers a discussion on these two concepts in regards to my career aspirations. Those two concepts are ‘Cross-Cultural Communication’ and ‘Public Speaking’. I have found these two concepts as highly applicable in my professional career ahead. I belong to Australia, which has a long history of attracting people from the diverse culture from across the globe (Ng & Metz, 2015). Hence, I am definitely expecting to be under scenarios where I would be with people who do not understand my language or are not familiar with my culture as well. On a similar note, I may also not have an understanding of their cultures and languages. It is, therefore, important for me and for my professional career that I am serious about two concepts that I have picked from all topics being covered during the entire ten weeks.  

Relevance of Cross-Cultural Communication and Public Speaking to Professional Goals

The reason behind me selecting ‘Public Speaking' as the other topic is that I feel nervous while communicating in front of others or in public. I definitely do not want to stay at just a startup level but rather want to go up the ladder towards attaining higher positions in the company. Evidently, it is important to focus on skills, which are essentially required to represent bigger positions such as the managerial positions. I feel blessed to be a part of the semester because it helped me to identify and understand extensively about a various thing that affects business communication.

Cross-cultural communication applies to my future aspirations in a number of ways. Being from the management background, I would be needed to take part in projects. Those projects will have my peers and project managers working together. I may be needed to work with a few people who are not originally from Australia but rather are from other parts of the world. In such circumstances, I will have no other option than to come to the common ground. However, it does not look feasible either as while doing projects I will have probably no time to work on other activities. It is, therefore, important for me that I start learning various ways of dealing with different people in projects and in my company. On a similar note, public speaking also applies to my career. Public speaking capabilities are about delivering a speech or making a presentation. ‘Public speaking’ is an art that very few people have. Public speaking, for example, is an essential quality of managers that allow them to effectively convince their audience (Niles et al., 2015).

To apply this to my professional career, I will be needing an action plan to help me progress towards achieving the goal. The action plan will have a goal. My goal will be maximizing the chances for me to be selected for higher positions through the exploration of expertise like efficiency level in ‘cross-cultural communication’ and in ‘public speaking’. The goal will be followed by relevant and feasible objectives, which will help me to effectively carry on my action plan. The last stage of the action plan will be about implementing actions and taking help of relevant and supportive resources. One of my actions would be accessing to textbooks, and journal articles on business communication. Along with it, I would also take part in projects to work with a variety of people to understand how they tackle such projects. Since project managers can differ in respect to their approach to overcome the communication barriers; hence, I will come to know about different strategies to tackle the communication challenges. A reflective piece of writing is something, which I will always do as this helps to know about where I have gone wrong and how to overcome the challenge.

Therefore, ‘cross-cultural communication’ and ‘public speaking’ are two of the business communication challenges, which can affect teams’ productivity, delay projects and hamper the reputation. I, being, a management student will be required to work extensively towards improving my skills as communicating with people from diverse cultures and making public speeches. These skills will be required to be eligible for higher positions in reputed companies.

References

Aslani, S., Ramirez?Marin, J., Brett, J., Yao, J., Semnani?Azad, Z., Zhang, Z. X., ... & Adair, W. (2016). Dignity, face, and honor cultures: A study of negotiation strategy and outcomes in three cultures. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 37(8), 1178-1201.

Callahan, R. M., & Humphries, M. H. (2016). Undermatched? School-based linguistic status, college going, and the immigrant advantage. American educational research journal, 53(2), 263-295.

Imhof, M., Välikoski, T. R., Laukkanen, A. M., & Orlob, K. (2014). Cognition and interpersonal communication: The effect of voice quality on information processing and person perception. Studies in Communication Sciences, 14(1), 37-44.

Jenifer, R. D., & Raman, G. P. (2015). Cross-cultural communication barriers in the workplace. Internafional Journal of Management, 6(1), 348-351.

Jiang, X., Flores, H. R., Leelawong, R., & Manz, C. C. (2016). The effect of team empowerment on team performance: A cross-cultural perspective on the mediating roles of knowledge sharing and intra-group conflict. International Journal of Conflict Management, 27(1), 62-87.

Kiselev, S. Y., & Glozman, J. M. (2016). Holistic brain mechanism in preschool children with weakness in grammar understanding. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 233, 83-87.

Lucas, K., & Rawlins, J. D. (2015). The competency pivot: Introducing a revised approach to the business communication curriculum. Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, 78(2), 167-193.

Mavridis, N. (2015). A review of verbal and non-verbal human–robot interactive communication. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 63, 22-35.

Neuliep, J. W., & Johnson, M. (2016). A cross-cultural comparison of Ecuadorian and United States face, facework, and conflict styles during interpersonal conflict: An application of face-negotiation theory. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 9(1), 1-19.

Ng, E. S., & Metz, I. (2015). Multiculturalism as a strategy for national competitiveness: The case for Canada and Australia. Journal of Business Ethics, 128(2), 253-266.

Niles, A. N., Craske, M. G., Lieberman, M. D., & Hur, C. (2015). Affect labeling enhances exposure effectiveness for public speaking anxiety. Behaviour research and therapy, 68, 27-36.

Serrat, O. (2017). Understanding and developing emotional intelligence. In Knowledge Solutions (pp. 329-339). Springer, Singapore.

Tombleson, B., & Wolf, K. (2017). Rethinking the circuit of culture: How participatory culture has transformed cross-cultural communication. Public Relations Review, 43(1), 14-25.