Diverse Organizations

Any job you take will involve some degree of intercultural communication. A teacher may have students whose families are from different parts of the country or from other countries entirely; an entrepreneur must understand how different groups respond to her product and her marketing campaigns. Being aware of how culture affects communication is especially crucial to business communication across borders (Busch, 2009). During negotiations, for instance, you may need to know how hard to push a client to commit and when to be silent. The increasingly global reach of organizations also means that managers need to be effective leaders with increasingly multicultural workforces (Mazur, Boboryko-Hocazade, & Dawidziuk, 2012; Okoro & Washington, 2012).

Clearly, intercultural communication is important in your life as a student, as a citizen, and as a professional. The culture in which you live (or were raised) has particular ways of communicating in the world. We illustrate these now by examining seven cultural variations.