In intercultural communication class, we've learnt many various things about how culture effects the way we live, communicate, and hold values, etc. in other words, how different people in various countries live day to day. But intercultural communication isn't just day-to-day interaction; it is also how people run things in their countries, like businesses, healthcare, and education. Different part of the world have different values, ways of communicating, etc. Because of globalization and how easily people can move places to places, if people from different part of the world have to work together or have to interact to one another, there would be a problem arise.
These problems are inevitable because just like I mentioned different people have different way that they behave or think based on their own culture. Samovar (2017) mentioned 3 assumptions regarding the topic of intercultural communication context. 3 assumptions that he mentioned were: communication is rule governed; this means that there are rules on what and how we communicate in both verbal and nonverbal way. Second, context dictates communication rules; when communicating or interacting with one another, we should know the context of the situation first to be able to lay down the rules or our position in the interpersonal communication of how we communicate. And lastly communication rules vary across cultures; this means that everyone has their own way of how they read the contexts and how they would interact or communicate with one another according to their own upbringing. (p. 340-342)
And having different way that we behave or think is not a bad way, we as a human being just need to be open minded and be mindful about how we interact with one another. Especially in the context of business, education and healthcare. One of the examples that we can see of having various people with different ethnic background is the USA. There are a lot of immigrants that came from all over the world that are currently live in the US, certainly they would also have their own different way of behavior or thinking. Because of this a lot of people are able to adapt and understand each other easily. This does not mean that problems won't occur but they would solve the problem faster than countries that are homogeneous. Another example that I can apply to from my experience is when I volunteer to teach English to immigrants from Indonesia that are currently working in a foreign country. Most of the workers are still in the same continent but problems would occur between the employers and the employees. Most of the issues that would come up is mostly due to the language barriers. If they aren't able to communicate with each other with verbally and limited on communicating nonverbally, of course there will be misunderstandings between both parties.
In order for all of the parties that are involved to have a successful communication, all parties must make an effort to be more open and learn about each other's culture. If all parties are able to do it then they can meet in the middle regardless of the context. This can apply to all situational context just like education, business, healthcare, etc.
References
Samovar, L. A., Porter, R. E., McDaniel, E. R., & Roy, C. S. (2017). Communication Between Cultures. Cengage Learning.
