Cultural Diversity and Communication Barrier

문화적 다양성이 커뮤니케이션에 미치는 영향

We're living in a world of one global village. The globalization of business is acceleration as more companies cross national borders to find customers, materials and money. Many foreign companies and organizations are doing their business aggressively in Korea and many Korean companies and rushing into foreign market. When people communicate for business with someone from another culture, there could be difficult communication barriers to overcome resulting from differences in their values, beliefs, norms for behavior, expectations, attitudes and so on. To do successfully business, we need to understand culture background and communication style that is different from nation, race, language. Communication barriers stemming from cultural differences may vary. Largely, they can be divided into value system, non-verbal communication, and perception process. Value system can be divided into individualism versus group orientation, avoidance of uncertainty degree, power distance, and high- context culture versus low-context culture. Also non-verbal communication method and perception process may play decisive roles in communication effectiveness. Especially nonverbal communication barriers which sometimes play more important roles than the verbal parts are composed of eye contact, gesture, kinesics, proxemics, chronemics, paralanguage and language of color Cross-cultural communication affect business situation. I expect that if we understand cultural background, and then we overcome cross-cultural communication barriers. To overcome and to adapt inter-cultural business, we need to develope curriculum on the cross-cultural education which I will study in the next paper.