Inter Cultural Communication

Executive Summary

This case study reflects on inter- cultural communication conflict. Japanese culture is collective in nature while Australian culture tends to be more individualistic. The non- defined goals in the beginning between both coordinators also ensued problems. As according to negotiation process, goals should be defined, then setting of roles should be done and then in the end, procedures are carried out. Because of the lacking of communication from the Sam’s side and lacking of tolerance of Mika to ambiguity led to problem.

Introduction

Every culture has its own preferable strategies and styles for coping with and handling conflict. Culture has often been explained as making distinctions in the manner of sending and receiving messages received (Loosemore & Lee, 2002, 517-524) It is determined by culture how messages are encoded by individuals, for the transmission of communication, what medium is chosen by them and the way messages are interpreted. It entails that when in an international setting, a message is transmitted culture might play a role as a sort of disruption, which can misrepresent the meant communication. It’s stated by Gudykunst and Kim (1997) that without initially comprehending their cultural filters, the behaviour of strangers cannot be accurately interpreted or predicted by individuals. In the same way, it’s argued by Beamer (1992) that when a message is interpreted by receivers in line with their own cultural context or belief system then problems arises, which may induce a dissimilar version to what had been intended by sender.

Analysis

A two day conference was held by PTB Company at Sydney. The conference was aimed for providing an opportunity for both the staff of Australia and Japan to learn of new sales and marketing directions and to have the opportunity to network with other PTB staff. However, the true essence of conference was not attained as a number of issues beset the conference, mainly because of intercultural communication issue. And Japanese workers have a feeling that they were not treated.

For the sake of correspondence among conference attendees and management of conference, Sam Peterson from Australia and Mika Mori from Japan were selected.

Since Mika was very experienced in organising conferences, she was chosen by the Japanese arm of PTB organization. She had been waiting for Sam to contact her. But Sam did not communicate with her either by phone or email, and she believed it was Sam’s role to make the first contact. She only received one email stating Sam was looking forward to meeting her, and stating that all conference details had been posted onto the company’s intranet site. Mika considered Sam probably is the worst communicator she had ever met, as she felt he was inconsiderate,