Paying a team member a compliment such as ‘You did a great job or ‘You are a real expert in your field’ seems like a great thing for a manager to do. However, ‘no’ can sometimes also mean ‘yes’. In Chinese organisations the hierarchical distance tends to be high and subordinates don’t want to bother more senior colleagues with detailed questions which may cause annoyance or make them seem less capable. Instead, they will try to figure it out by themselves rather than ask their boss for help or more information. It can feel too uncomfortable to say ‘no’ even though that’s what they really mean. In high context cultures such as China, when a manager assigns a task to subordinates and asks if they can complete it, they are more likely to say ‘yes’ even when they don’t understand or if they know that they can’t complete the task. Sometimes, words can be interpreted differently according to the context, so ‘yes’ can mean ‘no’ in some situations. When communicating in China, the sender needs to provide sufficient context and the receiver needs to infer intended meaning and closely observe any non-verbal signals such as facial expression or gestures. If you neglect the importance of context in China, you increase the chances of misunderstanding, confusion and even conflict. HallĬhina is considered a high context culture as communication tends to be indirect and the real message needs to be interpreted according to the context. It is more important to release the right response than to send the right message. The essence of cross-cultural communication has more to do with releasing responses than with sending messages. Low-context communication is more explicit as it relies more on the words used and less on a shared context and the relationship between the speakers. So, if you are communicating with business partners from a high-context culture, you need to pay more attention to what is not said as much as the words used. High-context communication relies more heavily on shared context and so the message is often implicit. Context refers to environmental and interpersonal factors that impact the way communication takes place. Hall, respected anthropologist and one of the founders of the field of intercultural communication, developed the concept of high and low context cultures. People from different cultural backgrounds do not always share the same values or communicate in the same way perhaps they are more or less direct, they may use gestures differently, be comfortable or uncomfortable with silence, or have different attitudes to hierarchy to name just a few potential differences.Įdward T.
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