Interpersonal and intercultural communication

In a world of increasing economic, social and cultural interaction, issues of communication are inevitably becoming essential. In the first post, we have talked about the role of communication in our lives. The fact is that although we communicate with each other on a daily basis, not everyone can do it effectively. In such situation, interpersonal and intercultural communication skills will really help us improve our interaction to a higher level.

Basically, interpersonal communication refers to the interaction in which people are able to share ideas with each other implicitly through shared history or body language. Obviously, such communication is indeed crucial in our globalised world now, when we can easily interact with whom we already knew before. For example, in some work environment, colleagues often create some signals that only people involved can understand, in order to for everyone to communicate faster and easier. However, this kind of communication, at some level, is also the main reason for conflicts if the people we are communicating with don’t understand us well. My own experience about my first day coming to the Hall where I live now can perfectly describe such difficulty: my block-mates who have already lived together sometimes talk about stories that made me confused. Gradually, I have known more and more about such stories and integrated more with my friends.

Intercultural communication is, in some way, similar to interpersonal communication. However, it is different in the way that people are able to communicate with others from differing cultural backgrounds. Communication is not just verbal, it is also non-verbal which includes body language, gesture, etc. Sometimes, conflicts happen because we are unconscious of highly contextual elements that are imperceptibly attached to our story. That is the reason why we can make a misunderstanding when interacting with people from other culture. As a whole, only through gaining comprehensive knowledge about cultures are we able to bring communication to a deeper level.

Personally, the module CG1413 I’m taking is really a good chance for me to improve both interpersonal and intercultural communication. Being a member of a group from different cultures, I am strongly convicted that through experience of group meetings or talking, my communication skills will be greatly better.

Reflection on principles of communication and teamwork

Nowadays, effective communication and teamwork skills are increasingly recognized as main factor contributing to job success. Let’s see how these skills are about and why they play such an important role.

Communication basically is a process of conveying information from one to another. At every stage of the communication process, there is a chance of confusion or interference that can disrupt the interaction. Our goal, therefore, is to remove all such barriers. First, the message needs to be clear, concise and concrete. After this step, encoding, the process of conveying the message effectively is also of great importance, due to some potential of confusion. Decoding, the process of understanding the message correctly, faces the same difficulty; in such circumstances, social knowledge can be the key solution. Another factor of communication is feedback from receiver, which is also very useful because it improves the sender’s ability to convey the message. Last but not least, the channel through which the message is transmitted is definitely crucial because it is very common that people often choose wrong channels. The reason is that each channel has different strengths and weaknesses, so we need to choose carefully the appropriate channel for each kind of message.

In the context of a globalized-and-interdependent world, being a perfect individual is not desired as much as being involved in a perfect teamwork. However, there are many factors required for a team to work effectively, including good leadership, effective communication, conflict resolution, empowerment. As the whole, operating a team is much harder than operating a group because it requires each member supplementing others to accomplish the final target. Especially, in today‘s fast-paced and industrialized world, teamwork has emerged as a requirement for business success.

With the advent of globalisation, people from every country will converge to work together. As a global student, I feel that such these skills are really indispensable in improving my career prospect afterwards.