Contents

• Introduction
• What is stereotyping?
• Social cognition
• Inter-group relations
• The use of stereotypes in cross-cultural communication
• Conclusion
• References

Description

When an organization makes cross border investments or when the employees of certain disciplines are from cultures that are alien to that of the host nation, communication barriers arise. Unless different cultural groups interact with one another with an understanding of the beliefs, practices and priorities of the groups synergy among different cultural groups cannot arise. Learning a common language that is known to different groups helps the cause of cross cultural communication to a great degree. Even learning languages of different cultures helps too. However, more than learning language one needs to understand how a particular cultural group behaves in a particular social or organizational situation. Some of the common stereotyping about cultures are ‘Australians are laid back, Americans are aggressive, Asians are noisy, Japanese value hygiene to a great degree’ and so on. These are generalized perceptions about cultures. However, such understanding cannot really help in dealing with cultural differences in an organization or in dealing with a group of employees that are from different cultures. Organizations need to address such issues in order to create synergy among their human resource irrespective of cultural backgrounds. One of the effective tools that can be used in effecting better communication among different cultural groups in ‘cultural stereotyping’. If used properly cultural stereotyping can greatly increase the effectiveness of the communication between members of different cultural groups (Glaveanu, 2007). The paper analyses two models of stereotyping viz., social cognition and inter-group relations to analyze as to how they can improve cross cultural communications.