Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, Second Edition

Intercultural Communication Barriers to Organizational Learning

Based on our experiences with MNCs and an examination of the intercultural literature, we will address those factors or barriers in cross-cultural communication in the following sections that most directly influence organizational learning, generally by delimiting how messages are perceived and interpreted. The transactional nature of intercultural communication indicates that the parties involved are simultaneously senders and receivers, but for ease of categorization, we have divided the factors into sender- and receiver-related categories as shown in Figure 26.1. The sender-related factors consist of marginality, stereotypes, style differences that distinguish senders and receivers, and the linguistic ability of the sender. The receiver-related category includes the receivers’ cosmopolitanism and their tendencies toward satisficing and plateauing of cultural knowledge. The aggregate of the factors that affect senders and receivers can be seen as their degree of intercultural sensitivity (Bennett, 1993) or cultural intelligence (Ang and Van Dyne, 2008; Early and Ang, 2003), which in turn relates to an MNC’s ‘level of readiness’ and potential for organizational learning. We have chosen these factors carefully based on the cross-cultural communication literature, but, because this is a pioneering conceptual work, there is no way to gauge the relative weight and validity of these factors in global organizational learning ...