Intercultural Communication
Part 1
Communication is the key to human bonding. Communication acts as a bridging instrument that brings persons from various regions, tribes, and religions to interact and become one thing. There must be communication to express our feelings, thoughts, and understand other people’s thoughts and emotions. Intercultural communication can be defined as communicating with, working with, and understanding persons’ emotions from different values, backgrounds, behavioral, and world views. There must exist intercultural communication for members from different sets and values to interact both effectively and efficiently ( Yang, 2018) . Appropriate cultural communications involve traits that outfit the expectations of a certain culture, the degree of the relationship of the people involved in the situation, and its features. I conducted the Intercultural Competency Assessment (INCA). The purpose of the INCA was to investigate intercultural self-awareness, and the results were quite well.
The evaluation included 6 intercultural competencies. The components are communicative awareness, knowledge discovery, and respect for otherness. Others include tolerance of ambiguity, empathy, and behavioral flexibility. The following were each competency scores, respectively; 7, 8, 7, 8, 8, and 6. Respect for otherness, behavioral flexibility, and cultural awareness are placed in the intermediate competence level. This meant that I was beginning to view many aspects of intercultural competency as an outcome of my little experience and training. The results for empathy, tolerance of ambiguity, and discovery landed me in the full competence level. This reflected that many of the competencies I had developed in level two had enhanced and intuitive. At this level, I can cut in when difficulties arise and skillfully handle other group members without violating their values. I agree with INCA results since I was undertaking a new experience that gave birth to fruitful results that put me in a position to understand cultural competency and communication.
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Part 2
Critical incidents are essential tools for enhancing awareness and comprehending human expectations, interactions, behaviors, and attitudes. Critical incidents are usually used to involve participants at a meaningful, personal level and aid the persons involved in investigating the behaviors and attitudes that are key to the respective roles they perform. Critical incidents in intercultural communication training are precise descriptions of situations where a problem, misunderstanding, or conflict may come up due to differences in the interacting parties’ cultural values or the challenge of cross-cultural adaptation and communication. Each incident often delivers only detailed information to set the stage and manifests the participants’ emotions and reactions. Communication styles, in most cases, are based on cultural dimensions. Some of the cultural dimensions include avoidance of uncertainty, individualism, power distance, masculinity and polychromic.
1. Student’s incident whose urge to be moved up to higher class is rejected .
In the first incident, we see a student who is not satisfied with her new class for reasons we don’t know. This student wants to move to a different higher class where the student thinks she belongs. The student takes a step and makes consultations with various advisors. The first student advisor rejects the student’s quest to be promoted to another class. This results in a misunderstanding between the two parties as the student advisor advise the student that she cannot move up to another class at this time, maybe because they have not completed the academic year or because the student does not have quality grades facilitate her promotion. This same student goes ahead and consults and student advisor who gives the same feedback as the first advisor. The student is not yet satisfied she makes other steps of approaching different authorities of the school, starting from the coordinator of her language training program up to the dean, who explained well to the student that it was not the right time for the student to be moved to a higher class after consultations made with the student teacher and the student scores. She is still not content about why she could not be promoted ( Winterich, Gangwar, & Grewal, 2018). The teacher is left wondering as she could not understand the student could not accept his decision. She could stay in the same class until she meets the requirements for the higher class. The teacher also fails to appreciate why the student failed to recognize the policies in place, and no matter how high the student gets, it will not change the outcome of her. The scenario tells that the student assumes she does not belong to the class she is in. She believes that she is more comfortable, and she can be better if she is only moved up to the higher class she cries for. The teacher assumption tells that for the student to develop educationally and transform into a better person; she must remain in the same class. The assumption might be made based on the student scores as they are assumed to reflect students’ intelligence levels. The teacher also assumes that the student is well conversant with the school policies. Here we see the power distance culture dimension.
2. Incident of Robert sent abroad to take a new office
In the second incident, we see Robert, a guy who has been sent abroad to a new office in a difficult situation of selecting some local hires for office positions. Robert is new in the place does not understand well the cultural values of the place. As he tries to find bilingual and experienced persons, he finds out that one of the applicants is the managers’ nephew and should be given special consideration ( Allen at el,. 2019). The scenario shows us the kind of favoritism and inequality that goes on in the offices. The act of the manager reporting back to the company inflexible and disrespectful raises some issues of concern. The manager seems to lack intercultural communication qualities since Robert does not belong to his ethnicity
3. Incident of Sara and his colleague in the workplace.
The other incident is when Sara is a new employee who, most of the time, comes to her desk and starts sharing his stories even outside the scope of work. Sara feels that she should report her colleague for sexual harassment since the colleague breaks the personal space and is uncomfortable with the distance ( Isaak, Vashdi, & Steiner-Lavi, 2018). The colleague, on the other hand, thinks that Sara is entertaining him. He also assumes Sara is comfortable with him and can build some other relationship out of work. Also, since she is a new employee, he might think that she does not understand how work is done and take advantage of her.
References
Allen, J., Eboli, L., Forciniti, C., Mazzulla, G., & de Dios Ortúzar, J. (2019). The role of critical incidents and involvement in transit satisfaction and loyalty. Transport policy , 75 , 57-69.
Isaak, V., Vashdi, D., & Steiner-Lavi, O. (2018). The long-term effects of a prevention program on the number of critical incidents and sick leave days. International journal of mental health systems , 12 (1), 71.
Winterich, K. P., Gangwar, M., & Grewal, R. (2018). When celebrities count: Power distance beliefs and celebrity endorsements. Journal of Marketing , 82 (3), 70-86.
Yang, P. (2018). Developing TESOL teacher intercultural identity: An intercultural communication competence approach. TESOL Journal , 9 (3), 525-541.
