MGCR 222 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Selective Perception, Interpersonal Communication, Linguistics
Communicating Across Cultures
• Communication – the principle way we reach out to others to exchange ideas
and commodities, develop and dissolve team relationships, and conduct business
• Often, unintended words, behaviors, signs, and symbol can lead to
misunderstandings, embarrassment, and even lost business opportunities
• Our frames of reference and personal experiences – even our world views – can
all work to filter message transmission and reception by screening in or out what
we will likely attend to and by attaching meaning to how messages are
interpreted and dealt with
• In any cross-cultural exchange between managers from different regions, the
principal purpose of communication is to seek common ground, to seek ideas,
information, customers, and sometimes even partnership between the parties
• Communication is an interactive process between senders and receivers in which
senders encode their messages into a medium and then transmit them through
often noise-infested airways to receivers, who then decode messages, interpret
them, and respond appropriately
o Throughout this process, cultural differences and potential cross cultural
misunderstandings are typically subsumed under the broad category of
noise
• This advice neglects two major impediments to effective communication:
attention and interpretation:
o Messages are effective only to the extent that recipients are both paying
attention to them and capable of processing the information in ways that
facilitate meaning
o Attention-interpretation-message model – see page 131 of course pack
for definition through illustration
▪ Attention → recipients must notice and select out intended
messages from a barrage of other often simultaneous messages for
particular attention
▪ Interpretation → once a message is selected, the recipients must
interpret or decode it
▪ Message (response) → recipient must decide whether or not to
reply and, if so, how to construct and transmit a response
o Numerous factors in the communication environment serve to reinforce,
attract, or distract attention towards or away from some messages at the
expense of others
▪ Other competing messages
▪ Language in use
▪ Visual and audible noise
▪ Nature of interpersonal relationships
▪ Power distance between speakers
▪ Degree of shared knowledge among the speakers
▪ Attitudes and perceptions
▪ Pressing needs as experienced by both parties
• Two interrelated cultural screens (lenses) can affect both interpersonal
interactions in general and multicultural communication in particular → emerge
as a result of cultural differences between senders and receivers
o They are part of the communication environment
o They represent potential impediments the AIM model
▪ Culturally mediated cognitions in communication – how people and
messages are often evaluated and processed in the minds of
senders and receivers alike
▪ Culturally mediated communication protocols – how we construct
or shape our messages in ways that may be culturally consistent for
us, but we hope, not problematic for our intended receivers
• At least four commonly used culturally mediated cognitions can be identified:
language and linguistic structures, selective perception, cognitive evaluation, and
cultural logic
o Language and linguistic structures
▪ The manner in which words, grammar, syntax, and the meaning of
words are organized and used
▪ While culture provides the meanings and meaning-making
mechanisms underlying existence, language provides the symbols
to facilitate the expression of such meanings
▪ When determining which language should be used in
conversation…
• Some argue that English is increasingly becoming the
language of global business
• Others have suggested that the language to be spoken
should be determined by who has the money – consistent
with “serve the customer”
▪ A different language is not just a dictionary of words, sounds, and
syntax → it is a different way of interpreting reality
▪ Languages can vary in their precision
▪ Languages provide subtle yet powerful cues about what to account
for in our dealings with other people (respect, social distance, and
so forth)
• For instance, different forms of “you” in different languages
▪ Depending on the language being spoken, managers must attend to
different cues and focus on different aspects of their context and
message
▪ Learning the language of the host-country is one of the most
common recommendations
o Selective perception
▪ People cannot simultaneously focus on all the events surrounding
them at a given time → they use selective perception to choose
what to focus on and what to ignore
▪ Make mental choices about what is important, useful, or
threatening and focus mental powers on these particular issues
▪ As such, the information that becomes important is in the eye of
the beholder – the information they are looking for – while other
potentially useful information is often left by the wayside
▪ While nonverbal communication is commonly used throughout
much of Asia as a way to convey information with subtlety, many
people in the West fail to notice it because they are not looking for
it
o Cognitive evaluation
▪ Cognitive evaluation – when people see or hear something, they
have a tendency to categorize the information so that they can
make judgments about its authenticity, accuracy, and utility
• They try to relate it to other events/actions so they can make
sense of it and know how to respond
▪ Research has shown that Americans, raised in an individualistic
society, often rely on the isolated properties of people or object
they are examining in order to attach meaning or enhance
understanding
▪ People tend to have better recall of information when it is
consistent with their cultural knowledge and values
▪ Norm of authenticity – belief that external actions and emotional
displays are, or should be, generally consistent with internal states
