Intercultural communication in transnational work

Take just a minute to reflect: What do you think: are misunderstandings between people from different countries always a question of culture?

Each person has his or her own set of values, norms, beliefs and attitudes which are due to his or her cultural background. These elements are part of our orientation system and help us to understand the world we live in. They guide our perception of the world around us. So, depending on our own culture, we will interpret other people’s visible behaviour differently. It is like having our own cultural glasses through which what we see becomes more or less strange, or more or less acceptable to us.

However, how we act and react is not always deducible from our cultural background only. Our actions are always influenced by

• individual,
• situational and
• cultural aspects.

(see for the attribution triangle: Fachstelle für Internationale Jugendarbeit der Bundesrepublik Deutschland e.V., n.d.)

When we try to understand why a misunderstanding with somebody from another country happened, we should consider all three aspects by asking:

• Can I attribute the reason for the misunderstanding to the counterpart’s different culture?
• Was the misunderstanding maybe influenced by the situation (stress, anxiety etc.)?
• Or was the misunderstanding rather due to the counterpart’s personality?

Asking the questions helps to single out and focus on one aspect facilitating the understanding of its role in the whole situation (https://www.austausch-macht-schule.org/materialien/ikus ).

Just take minute to reflect: Imagine you have your weekly project meeting. You are all working on the application for an international project. As usual the meeting starts and everybody is chatting about this and that, maybe also about some tasks lately done for the application. Suddenly your team member from a German speaking country, who entered the room only shortly before and who seems to be rather upset, becomes quite agitated and shouts: “So now we should really start talking about the application. These meetings are always a waste of time!”

To what aspect do you attribute the behaviour of the team member: cultural, individual or situational?

You could perhaps think that the behaviour is due to team member’s culture. In German speaking countries, meetings are there to talk about the topics related to the agenda of the meeting. Time is precious and “wasting” time maybe with some introductory small talk can be a cause of dissatisfaction. In this case, however, the upset state of the team member when entering the room could also induce to another interpretation. The outburst could also be attributed to a stressful situation on a personal level.