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Cross-Cultural Communication Essay

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Cross-Cultural Communication Essay
Nguyen Hong Minh
Business Communication
October 30, 2013
Douglas Foster

Cross-Cultural Communication Essay Different cultures lead to different way of thinking and behaviors (Hofstede 1991). For this reason, many problems in communication across countries occur when people are unaware of culture differences, especially to high-context culture. Hall (1976) suggested that one must put great efforts to understand the message from a context-dependent communication. It is essential that business people bear in mind that learning cultures and intercultural communication are vital. In the current increasingly diverse world, intercultural communication obviously plays an important role (Germaine, 2006). As a developing country with high-context culture, Vietnamese workers should be well prepared to overcome difficulties when dealing with other cultures in global business integration process. This essay will look at specific aspects of cultural elements of communication in Viet Nam and compare barriers in Viet Nam to those in the UK. Through these boundaries, the essay suggests several intercultural competencies that Vietnamese managers should train their employees in order to work well under multi-cultural environment.
Communication in Viet Nam According to Das and Kumar (2010), Viet Nam’s culture, which is among Asian countries, is classified as high-context. In this system, communication style has many specific characteristics. The first element is that one should look deeply at not only non-verbal behavior of speaker but also the context in order to understand the message. It means the spoken words just represent half of the story. The main idea depends mostly on the environment. This may cause confusion to one who comes from low-context culture where everything is

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