Case Study: Barriers Of Cross-Cultural Communication

He & Liu (2010) examined, barriers of cross cultural communication in multinational firms: a case study of Swedish company and its subsidiary in China. The sample company is a medium-sized company with about 200 employees, and it is one of the famous companies in the office appliance manufacture industry in Europe. The authors have interviewed three managers, R&D manager, Technical and Production manager, and Quality Control manager, they are all Swedish in Sweden parent company and two managers R&D manager and Assistant manager of Vice President, both of them are Chinese in Chinese subsidiary. The findings of this study indicate that the barriers of communication come from the national culture’s influence on the workplace and behaviors of

There were two samples of people consisted of the first 46 MBA students from the College of Business Administration, University of Hawaii and the second consisted of 93 graduate students attached to the East West Centre from the United States, Australia, Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Nepal, Philippines, and Thailand. The Cronbach’s alpha, correlation analysis, multiple regression analysis, Wilcoxon Rank-Sum Test, t test, z test was done on the data. The study reveals that individualism and collectivism can be used as constructs to measure intercultural sensitivity with respectable reliability and validity. The combining of individualism and collectivism with flexibility and open-mindedness improves the quality of the measuring instrument. Those who have more than three years of cross-cultural experience are more sensitive than those who have fewer years of experience. Intercultural sensitivity developed by people relates to the number of different ethnic foods people have tried on their own. The ability to enjoy working with people from other cultures on difficult tasks is significantly correlated with intercultural

The analyses show that organizations should critically examine the global-local context of the cross-cultural issues to overcome the obstacles of cultural diversity in convergent tasks of software development work and maximize its values in divergent tasks of the work activities. Cultural awareness and cultural diversity understanding should be viewed as important skills for the future IS/IT workforce. Organizational human resource practices should adopt the sense-making approach for cross-cultural training and knowledge sharing. In order for organizations to compete in the global market in the future, cultural diversity knowledge should become an important part of the organization’s intellectual capital and strategic