Cross-cultural awareness

Essay by raddieUniversity, Bachelor'sB, July 2005

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Business people today face an increasing range of culturally diverse situations. To ensure success in business, many organizations are using cross-cultural training to improve their manager's cross-cultural effectiveness and enhance their communication skills. In a diverse workplace there are many cultures collide. Many culture norms influence a manager's behavior and subsequent reactions (Gardenswartz L. and Rowe A., 2001). "Culture is behind our behavior on the job. Often without our realization, culture influences how close we stand, how loud we speak, how we deal with conflict - even how we participate in a meeting." (Gardenswartz L. and Rowe A., 2001, p139). This essay will provide the definition of cross-cultural and discuss cross-cultural training used in business and organizations. In this brief essay, to further discuss about the importance of cross-cultural training in business, the involvement and the examples. Discussion about benefits brought by the training and perspective of the importance of cross-cultural training will also provided.

Culture consists of patterns of behavior and beliefs, which characterize a group of people at a given point in time. The behavior may relate to religious practices, rituals, and food choices etc. Cross-cultural differences in matters such as language, etiquette, non-verbal communication, and norms. The definition of cross-cultural awareness according to interviewee, David Nip said that we lived in a world, country and province made up of many different cultures. People of different cultures have been living together and understand how to communicate with each other's culture. Cross-cultural awareness is to understand how to communicate with each other's culture. (Tsui K.L., 2004). I reckon that is the main part of how goals can be achieved in a company or from an organization. If lack of communication amount teams or individuals then poor results of anything may occur.

Cross-cultural training has become important in today's business...