Culture and Interpersonal Communication

Personally and professionally, we are all bound to interact with people who have cultural and experiential backgrounds that are different from our own. These differences result in different perspectives, different styles of decision making, and different communication styles and expectations. Personally, developing intercultural competence is good choice, especially if you like to travel to different regions or countries. But cultural competence becomes integral at a professional level, where you will be expected to work with clients, colleagues, organizations, manufacturers, businesses, and industry leaders with world views and expectations that are different from yours.

The first step in understanding human and cultural diversity is to identify and learn about your own culture and to consider how your cultural orientation affects your perspectives, expectations, and communication style. This assignment is designed to help students look inward and analyze their own understandings, preferences, biases, and perspectives.

Purpose

To develop an understanding of your own cultural background so that you can more fully understand the driving factors behind:

Your communication preferences and expectations

Your perspective and world view

Your expectations of others

Your professional attitudes, preferences, and communication

Your personal and professional interactions with other

Objectives

This assignment achieves the following GenEd Human and Cultural Diversity assessment objective:

Satisfactory: Student identifies and recognizes new perspectives about own cultural rules/biases.

Exceeds Expectations: Student articulates insights into own cultural rules/biases.

Tasks

Complete the Culture and Interpersonal Communication reading and quiz

You must “Mark as Done” the reading page to move forward in the module

You must complete the quiz the move forward in the module

Next, use the Country Comparison tool (Links to an external site.) on the Hofstede Insights website

Choose the name of the country you grew up in

If you spent your childhood in more than one country, choose the country you feel was most formative/that you most identify with

If your country is not listed, choose a country that you understand to be very culturally similar. For example, some students from small countries/nations may not find their country listed, but may find that another country with a similar country is listed (for example, small countries that are often referred to in clusters, such as some islands)

Read the analysis generated below the search bar

You must click on the “Read More About Chosen Countries” button below the chart that appears to see the full analysis

You will use this analysis to answer the questions in the Cultural Communication Analysis document provided for you

Lastly, download this Cultural Communication Analysis document download and complete all sections (including the cover page)

Each question is listed on a different page, which have been separated using the “Page Break” formatting function in MS Word

Submission

Save your Word doc as a PDF (Links to an external site.) and submit the PDF (see linked YouTube video if you don’t know how to save Word docs as PDFs)

Upload your PDF to this assignment