Cross-Cultural Communication Barriers: Challenges They Pose and Ways of Overcoming Them

Cross-Cultural Communication Barriers, the Challenges They Pose to Team Productivity and Ways of Overcoming Them
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Cross-Cultural Communication Barriers, the Challenges They Pose to Team Productivity and Ways of Overcoming Them
The world has undergone intense transformation within a relatively short period. The factors responsible for this transformation have worked in tandem to produce a more interconnected world. These factors include the internationalization of businesses, the evolution of digital technologies, the growth of trade and commerce, and improvements in transportation modes and technologies. Consequently, businesses have become increasingly dependent on culturally diverse teams to run their operations across international borders in the past few decades. Initially, managing these teams was difficult as modern collaboration tools that seem ordinary today did not exist. The digital revolution began to ease these challenges with the invention of many tools that simplified remote collaboration.
Further, the Covid-19 pandemic increased the momentum of this transformation, as most businesses found themselves relying heavily on remote workforces. The pandemic has kick-started a social transformation that will alter the future of work. Business leaders have recognized the opportunities and advantages that a remote workforce provides. In addition, many workers have changed their attitudes toward work and now prefer jobs that provide the option of working remotely. As a result, teams will become increasingly culturally diverse moving forward, which will present many communication challenges that accompany cross-cultural teams. This literature review aims to understand multicultural communication barriers and the challenges they pose to team productivity and provide ways to overcome them when developing a personal brand.
According to Garriott et al.’s (2017) massive study on the development of multicultural literature in 11 years, the expansion of international trade and business has made it increasingly vital for individuals to master skills that foster personal agency to navigate work dynamics in multicultural teams. Chief among these skills is communicating effectively in a cross-cultural setting. Unfortunately, communication challenges usually scale in scope and proportion in the context of cross-cultural teams. Holding Eagle (2020) observed that most communication in cross-cultural teams is computer-mediated. As a result, important components of the communication process are lost in transmission as it is difficult to read body language in a conference call, get the tone of voice from an email, or understand other reactions germane to effective communication (Holding Eagle, 2020). Even in face-to-face physical communication, capturing these non-verbal cues is challenging for most people. This emphasizes the significance of this problem in cross-cultural communication, where team members also have to contend with other challenges like foreign accents and other language barriers.
Similarly, Zhang et al. (2021) observed that poor cross-cultural communication skills could cost team productivity. The authors found that failur...