Reading about Intercultural Communication in Workplace


I started reading the materials about intercultural communication today. I decided to accumulate knowledge about terms and concepts as much as possible since it is the topic of my first workshop.

I read the second chapter of Exploring Intercultural Communication written by Zhu Hua (2014), who is a distinguished Chinese professor of applied linguistics and communication. In this chapter, she mainly illustrated the different communication patterns in Chinese and British contents in terms of meetings, small talks and humor in workplace.  She has provided many interesting perspectives about intercultural communication as she has experience in both Chinese and British cultures. For example, she pointed out that compared to British communicational environment, Chinese model is more influenced by the concept of ‘power’, which put leaders and subordinates in a hierarchy and stopped deep communication between them. This is somehow a little paradoxical, because the orientation of Chinese meeting is usually improving interpersonal harmony and building relationships. I feel it’s very interesting because as a Chinese myself I have never noticed this implying meaning behind behaviors before.

The most significant difference in terms of meeting in different cultures is the time length they spend to move from opening meeting to specific agendas. This is a research (Lewis, 2006) showing that German spent the least time in achieving this, which is 2 to 3 mins, compared to Spain or Italy, which is 20 to 30 mins. I discussed this fact with one of my German friends, and according to him, 2 mins is quite accurate. Another concept I have learned from the reading is ‘turn-taking dynamics’, which refers to interrupt of to be interrupted. It closely related to the status of individuals and their level of expertise.



As for small talk and humor, they also play a very important roll in workplace communication. For example, small talk fills time to avoid undesirable silence while humor is conductive to effective workplace relationship and workplace creativity. However, what is more important is to choose a safe topic for small talk as it can be very different in various cultural contexts, and humor may cause deviation among people who don’t share the same style of humor.













I feel those theories about communication are very enlightening, but although it’s not difficult to understand those theories, it is very difficult to apply them to reality and become good at communicating with others in an intercultural workplace. It requires more practice than reading. 



Another reflective tip for myself is: always find a comfortable place to read.






Hua, Z. (2014). Exploring Intercultural Communication. London: Routledge.


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