COMR2010- Cultural Diversity: A Personal Perspective Assignment Sample

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• Subject Name : Cultural Diversity Essay

Cultural Diversity- A Reflective Journal

Introduction:

Cross cultural Communication is a tool though which people can study the nature and understands people from different cultural backgrounds and communicates with them. This gives the people an insight in different cultures and how they endeavor to communicate across the cultural diversity. In other words we can say culture is a way of a person thinks and live by picking some set of values, attitudes, norms and beliefs. There are many principles included with the culture, some are written and some are verbal and bonded with the law. All the culture share some kind of similarity, but different from geography, race, religions etc. Communication is an important aspect for human interaction and how people behave or interact with person of diverse culture depends upon the awareness and competence to understand (Barker, 2016). The basic strategies of border crossing such as dialogue, empathy, compassion and ability to have inter-cultural communication are important elements of study. This paper shall discuss these aspects by reflection. 

The behavioral tendency of a person to have effective communication with other person where certain ideologies are expressed depending upon cultural background and also respecting other person’s beliefs is called dialogue (Harikkala-Laihinen, and et al, 2018). Dialogue forms an integral part of effective and meaningful communication in situations where diverse or intercultural discussion happens. This could be evident from a situation when I got an opportunity to join a multinational bank where employees from different countries were working together. Once a Japanese client to the bank had some issues with the services provided to his account and he was furious. My colleague calmed the argument in an empathic mannerby understanding the issue of the Japanese client and peacefully addressing dialogue with him. The Japanese client who had the background of diverse culture was surprised with the ability of strategic dialogue with which my colleague helped him resolve the issue. This situation explains how dialogue is useful in understanding other’s cultural belief and viewpoint to solve problem through innovative approach and tactful negotiation skill. 

Dialogue helps to modify a person’s convictions and beliefs to understand about others (Slotte, &Hämäläinen, 2015).This helps a person to include conflicting perspectives for negotiating or solving issues. This helps in having compassion towards cultural differences and to live with these diversities. Border crossing enhances our acceptance to cultures of other people and raise above the mindset of judging people with categories and classifications. This means letting our guard down and accepting human basic trait of food, clothing, shelter and ritual as reason of similarity. This should be done with proper educating people and training to build trust and belief in other culture along with one’s self. Major workplaces like big conglomerates business houses and universities like Google, IBM, Citibank, Stanford, etc. have diverse cultured people working and educating under same social circle. People are living together with their inter-cultural faith and effective communications are done. 

Dialogue building with people also covers different parameters of human psychology when sympathy, empathy and compassion are invariably used to address any problem or conflict of interest among people. To understand how another person is feeling and communicate accordingly to make the other person gets solution to the problem or feel relieved is sympathy. Some people have tendency to actually understand and also feel the same feeling as other is observing is termed as empathy (Davis, 2018).  Most important aspect of psychological support to other person is to have meaningful conversation and along with willingness to provide solutions to relieve pain or problem of other person is called compassion (Anstiss, 2016). 

This could be illustrated with one of the incident when a German person bought a new property in a colony and his laptop along with cash was stolen within a week of residing in this new property. This person was new to the area and had different opinion on how the building should be built using technology for safety of the house. The alarm system in the building was made with application of some code and somehow a burglar broke the code and stole laptop and some cash from the German’s house. I approached the security personnel of the colony to look into this matter along with communicating it to the police. With sympathy in his way of communication, the security man heard patiently about the loss of things and assured German person who was sad and furious at the same time that he will do the necessary to avoid further delay in recovering things. What I witnessed was that German person was sad and security person showed his responsibility to address this theft. The security person spoke with empathic manner with the German person and assured him that he will do all the needful to recover his laptop which had important data and documents. Later in the evening, when German person and I asked security man regarding the possibility of recovery, he smiled and showed us the CCTV footage of the thief and how he was able to communicate to the local police. The laptop was retrieved but cash was spent by the thief. What I observed from this situation was security person handled this problem with compassion as he was able to partially recover the things stolen. 

This situation explains how inter-cultural communication could be done using adequate process of sympathy, empathy and compassion (Sorrells, 2015). In this cultural diverse world, proper communication could be done with appropriate use of techniques and strategies of intercultural communication such as dialogue, sympathy, empathy and compassion. Here, the fundamental of communication process is that in the current scenario, when people are facing stress and psychological changes which lead to perception changes, as could be seen in the change in behavior and attitude of the people, then there is a need to comprehend and perform in comprehensive manner which would result in effective communication. 

When differences within the society or communities are handled with open mind and heart to support decisions which are in the interest of society or community then only harmonious communication takes place. Individual context is considered as result of absolute acceptance of diverse culture with dialogue and willingness to listen to each other. Collective approach for making good impression or result in healing pains of other person by providing justice is communication in true sense. The awareness of diverse culture should be explained, taught and propagated on social level to create shared approach of intercultural learning with the use of modern innovative technologies. Thus, futures of inter culture could be created. 

This could be concluded from various studies that theory of border crossing helps to learn about various processes of behaving and communicating with people of different background. Each individual is unique and there is uniqueness in different cultures. With current businesses and lifestyle using innovative technologies in daily lives, the economies of world is coming close with its different cultures and belief. People understand and modify themselves to welcome others with diverse culture. Inter-cultural education and cross-cultural studies in universities and schools along with trainings in companies help people to think beyond their own personal needs for society good and global benefit at large. 

References:

Anstiss, T. (2016).Compassion at Work. The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of the Psychology of Positivity and Strengths‐Based Approaches at Work, 210-230.

Barker, G. G. (2016).Cross-cultural perspectives on intercultural communication competence. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 45(1), 13-30.

Davis, M. H. (2018). Empathy: A social psychological approach. Routledge.

Harikkala-Laihinen, R., Hassett, M., Raitis, J., &Nummela, N. (2018).Dialogue as a source of positive emotions during cross-border post-acquisition socio-cultural integration. Cross Cultural & Strategic Management, 25(1), 183-208.

Slotte, S., &Hämäläinen, R. P. (2015).Decision structuring dialogue. EURO Journal on Decision Processes, 3(1-2), 141-159.

Sorrells, K. (2015). Intercultural communication: Globalization and social justice. Sage publications.