Cynthia Li - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Cynthia Li

As the world becomes interconnected and easily accessible with the advancement of technology, mor... more As the world becomes interconnected and easily accessible with the advancement of technology, more and more companies now have the ability and interests to tap into foreign markets. Either by means of opening up local subsidiaries or outsourcing to another country, they are all inevitably involved in the interaction with an unfamiliar culture.
One of the challenges that confronts them is the increasing diversity of the workforce and similarly complex prospective customers with disparate cultural backgrounds. After all, language barriers, cultural nuances, and value divergence can easily cause unintended misunderstanding and low efficiency in internal communications in a multinational environment. It leads to conflict among employees and profit loss in organizational productivity. Therefore, in international organizations, cross-cultural communication, also known as intercultural and trans-cultural communication, serves as a lubricant, which mitigates frictions, resolves conflicts, and improves overall work efficiency; likewise, it serves as coagulant, integrating the collective wisdom and strength, enhancing the collaboration of team work, and uniting multiple cultures together between race and ethnicity, which leads to a desirable virtuous circle of synergy effect.
In the paper, I will identify three aspects of culture that constitute people’s understanding between each other in professional settings, namely, language and non-verbal codes; cultural values and beliefs; and cultural stereotypes and preconceptions. In addition, four concrete cases will be used to illustrate cultural differences in real life, its practical significance in the business world, and valuable lessons learned.

As the world becomes interconnected and easily accessible with the advancement of technology, mor... more As the world becomes interconnected and easily accessible with the advancement of technology, more and more companies now have the ability and interests to tap into foreign markets. Either by means of opening up local subsidiaries or outsourcing to another country, they are all inevitably involved in the interaction with an unfamiliar culture.
One of the challenges that confronts them is the increasing diversity of the workforce and similarly complex prospective customers with disparate cultural backgrounds. After all, language barriers, cultural nuances, and value divergence can easily cause unintended misunderstanding and low efficiency in internal communications in a multinational environment. It leads to conflict among employees and profit loss in organizational productivity. Therefore, in international organizations, cross-cultural communication, also known as intercultural and trans-cultural communication, serves as a lubricant, which mitigates frictions, resolves conflicts, and improves overall work efficiency; likewise, it serves as coagulant, integrating the collective wisdom and strength, enhancing the collaboration of team work, and uniting multiple cultures together between race and ethnicity, which leads to a desirable virtuous circle of synergy effect.
In the paper, I will identify three aspects of culture that constitute people’s understanding between each other in professional settings, namely, language and non-verbal codes; cultural values and beliefs; and cultural stereotypes and preconceptions. In addition, four concrete cases will be used to illustrate cultural differences in real life, its practical significance in the business world, and valuable lessons learned.