Question

Where in the communication process have you experienced the most breakdowns in communication? Why do you believe this is the case? Support your response with research.

I dont understand why your asking me to update the question...This is about breakdown communication.

I don't see in this...It says "Why do you believe this is the case?

I need someone who is expert to assist this. Thanks

Answer 1

While I feel communications with Interest groups are most comfortable to strike for me, I initially faced number of challenges with cross-cultural communications. I worked in an Organization where I was a marketing manager. My profile was to market and sell the IT-products to the companies with IT background. The catch was that, most of our clients whom I presented our products, were foreigners, hailing from various countries who had come to our country for some business deals.

In today’s business world, it is to be generally noted that one of the characteristics of effective communication is the speed of communicating the same. In our profile, we had other competitors as well, trying to pitch the same clients. Understanding the language and gestures of our clients, was one of our major challenges in the communication. Also, considering the speed that was needed to get the marketing information conveyed to the clients on time, would be equally important. For this, all our team-mates were required to be on the same page of communication.

Our organization’s intranet could address to such issues. However, the issues arouse with our members when the semantic differences would crop up. It was mainly due to differences in understanding of the word connotations by people hailing from two different culture but was able to still converse in one common language. Besides, the tonal differences and accent concerns also formed as a barrier to grasp the messages better. These were thus the major breakdowns in effective communication of our clients with us.

Our Trainer always explained us that one should keep the motive of transferring the messages clearly on one’s mind in terms of feelings, messages or emotions. Further the Trainer would emphasize upon the fact that when it comes to inter-cultural communication, if one lacks the competency of forming groups on basis of cultural similarity to certain extent, then the issues of semantic barriers may lead to further miscommunication, if not catered to in time.

Certain breakdowns in our communication with Foreign clients:

The differences in the perception owing to various reasons were one of the biggest challenges in our cross-cultural communication with the clients. Various clients hailing from different countries were vulnerable to their cultural influences that did not match that of ours. Accordingly, they developed a certain kind of communication mode to converse with each other that was difficult to initially comprehend by me or my team. The words, gestures, tone, etc. therefore differed between us because of the cultural factors. For example, in our country, the ‘A-Ok’ sign is just a friendly sign for “All right!” or “Good going!”. However, I realized with our Australian and Gulf-countries’ clients that was equivalent to what generations of high school students knew as “Flipping the bird”. Similarly, for us, the ‘Hook’em-Horns’ sign encouraged the University of Texas athletes, and it was a good luck gesture for our South American clients such as the ones hailing from Brazil and Venezuela. However, we experienced something different when we had to deal with African clients. We learnt gradually that in parts of Africa, it was rather a curse. Using such terms in communications, would initially backfire us but gradually , we learnt how to deal with the same, with extensive training before presenting our products to our foreign clients. Another instance was that of our Italian client. In Italy, ‘Hook’em-Horns’ was a signaling to a different that “Your spouse is being unfaithful”. Sometimes, that would be hilarious because it did not make any direct sense to our communications with them as we tried to professionally deal with marketing of our products but certainly, these instances could have been avoided, had we knew the breakdowns in communication in a better way.

Therefore, at times the same words or gestures could mean different in different cultures and hence can pose as the biggest challenges in the cross-cultural communication, thereby forming most of the breakdowns in cross cultural communications.