Assessment Of Cross-cultural Factors On Communication Effectiveness In Business

With the trend of globalization and the spread of multinationaloperations, transnational corporations are playing an important role in theworld. In organizations, communication is used to help colleagues toconvey messages and information, to connect people and motivate them toachieve organization’s objectives. But, when cross-cultural factors areinvolved, employees are confronted to many misunderstandings andconflicts which are disturbing and most times make them difficult tocollaborate with their colleagues in the work place. Therefore, how toachieve effective communication among employees with different culturalbackgrounds concerns the success of communication across cultures.Based on six cross-cultural factors especially language, gender, age, race,culture, and religion; this paper highlights the impact of these factors oncommunication effectiveness.By using201surveys collected from Chinese and Foreigners, the aimof this research is firstly, to analyze the influence of these factors oncommunication effectiveness; secondly to propose measurements tominimize misunderstandings and conflicts. The statistical tools of thisstudy are frequencies, correlation analysis, mean and standard deviation,crosstabs and linear regression analysis. Results show that language,gender, age, race, culture, and religion have impact on communicationeffectiveness in different level and13measurements are been accepted byrespondents as attitudes to reduce misunderstandings.Finally, as a study case, KONE Corporation is used to demonstrate thatsuccessful collaboration between managers and employees from differentcultural background is possible by overcoming cultural barriers.