Communication Issues for Multicultural Group

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall’s theory of high- and low-context culture helps us better understand the powerful effect culture has on communication. A key factor in his theory is context. This relates to the framework, background, and surrounding circumstances in which communication or an event takes place.

Let’s us look at the characteristic of high context culture and low context culture. When communicating with high context culture, they tend to drawn much information from surroundings. So when communicate with them, very little must be explicitly transferred. For them, non-verbal cues and signals are very important for determining the meaning. However, when communicate with low context cultures, Information must be provided explicitly, usually in words. When low context culture want to communicate ten, they will say all ten and in many cases elven or twelve just to be sure.

Sometimes, High context culture don’t take deadline so seriously, so you cannot assume that they will finish their work ahead of schedules, they might work until the last min. However, Low context culture take time commitments (deadlines, schedules) seriously, so you maybe can expect that they will finish their work ahead of schedules.

High context culture able to do multiple task at once, that’s why they are easy to be distract by other things. Low context culture don’t do multiple task in one time, they have to finish one task then they can continue with the next task, so they are more concentrate on job. High context culture are more concerned about the relations, so they are more on a long term basis. Low context culture more concerned about not disturbing others, so the relationship will be more short term basis.

Due to different culture, there will have some issues happen in the group when they try to communicate, let’s us now look some of the common issues. There is more than 6000 living languages exist in this world, to have a same language for every country to communicate,...