CULTURAL COMMUNICATION

Self-Reflection on Cultural Communication

Self-Reflection on Cultural Communication

Introduction

The culture plays an essential role in establishing communication style and behaviors of a person. The people belonging from different cultures are often found to be involved in different communication styles and practices. This paper discusses the Peruvian culture and its reflection on the communication style of people, who belong to this culture.

Collaboration and Communication

The Peruvian people like to work in teams. They are highly involved in sharing their thoughts and ideas with their friends and colleagues especially that are related to work. The people do not prefer to work in isolation or to achieve individual success, but they feel pride in being associated with a group, where each member of the group tries his/her level best to maintain the harmony in the group (Katz, 2006). Most Peruvian people find it immensely important to build long lasting interpersonal relationships and develop mutual trust. The people belonging to this culture prefer to engage in business relationships with the persons, whom they personally like and trust.

The characteristics of collaborative nature, open communication and sharing of information of Peruvian people are significantly similar while having cross cultural communications. The Peruvian people are often found to be friendly while having cross cultural communications, such as business meetings with foreign representatives.

Self-disclosure defines an approach of communication. It involves sharing of information about a person's self, his history, his present situations, his history, feelings, emotions and thoughts. Self disclosure influences by many factors, such as mutual trust, environment, age compatibility, cultural similarity and many more. There is a difference in self expression of the people belonging from different cultures (Kim and Ko, 2010). Some people consider it their strength to share their ideas, while others may not like to share themselves publicly. We can classify the culture in two categories: one in which self disclosure is common and in another not. The Peruvian people would then be categorized into the former one; these people like to talk about their families, children, lifestyle and other personal matters. They consider the self disclosure property as one of their strengths as it enables them to express their views freely, make relations quickly, make them socially recognizable, and distinguish themselves from others. They mainly like to share their views and aspects of personal life so that people may know about them, like them, trust them, and make relationships with them.

The Peruvian people like directness, but not as much as in many countries, like US. For example, in US, a person may directly say to his friend that he is busy at any moment, and would contact later. The same statement would, however, create problems in relationships, in the Peruvian culture; as the other person may misinterpret that the person refusing to talk does not want to talk ever. The people often involve in longer conversation sessions, just to avoid saying a clear “No”.

The people of Peruvian culture generally do not like to talk about Politics, even the discussion on ...