Intercultural communication in transnational work

Just take a minute to reflect: Imagine this situation: You work with your team on the application for an international project. Your team consists of people from Austria, Italy, Spain and Greece. Submission is in a month’s time. However you see the risk that the deadline will not be met. What can you do?

In order to identify conflicts in general, and intercultural conflicts especially, the challenge is to recognize early the conditions and situations in which conflicts can arise. As already mentioned, conflicts often arise because expectations are not fulfilled. You know that because of their cultural background your team has different understandings about time management and the importance of personal relationships. In this situation it will be helpful to have a meeting with all project partners. During this meeting try to establish trust and rapport to Italian, Spanish and Greek partners. Strengthening the personal relationship will help them to commit to the partnership and give you more assurance that the partners deliver on time. Prepare clear material to hand out. It should contain information about timelines, goals, project administration. This will give your German and Austrian partner enough assurance about the project schedule and content in order to being able to focus on the tasks.

Perhaps you ask yourself, what are the signs of a latent intercultural conflict?

They probably aren’t very much different from those between members of the same culture. So this could be lack of reliability, smaller “mishaps”, hostilities towards colleagues and the like (see also https://www.umsetzungsberatung.de/konflikte/konfliktpraevention.php).

Here are some tips about what you personally can do to avoid intercultural conflict

• Actively observe the situation
• Try to remember that different cultures may interpret the same situation quite differently
• Don’t judge the observed behaviour but try to understand it
• Listen actively and try to be culturally neutral
• Try to understand the values, beliefs and attitudes of other cultures by changing perspectives
• Establish rapport by finding out commonalities
• Save face – Respect others and make yourself respected
• Develop WIN-WIN solutions

(For this section see also Ting-Toomey, 2001, who describes it in a similar way).

https://pixabay.com/de/vectors/silhouette-beziehung-konflikt-3141264/

In summary: Like in conflict situations with members of your culture, it is also best to take a communicative approach when dealing with intercultural conflict. Be open, address the matter before the issue reaches the deeper layers and solidifies. Accept that when it comes to discussing values there is no real “right” or “wrong” – it is in most cases a question of culturally based perspective and judgement that may be different from your own.