When examining organizational learning in MNCs, it is clear that a strong intercultural component must be included in order to study and understand how organizations can be successful. MNCs by their very nature are engaged in business in a number of countries with often widely divergent cultures. This leads to increased ambiguity concerning meaning. ‘It is the ambiguity of meaning that marks the boundaries of culture’ (Cohen, 1985: 55)—‘the boundary is where the ambiguity begins, where managers can no longer be sure of the correctness of their interpretation of what is going on’ (Apfelthaler and Karmasin, 1998: 8). Ambiguity can lead to anxiety. Communicating with strangers (people from other cultures) is both a source of anxiety and a means for diminishing it. ‘Reducing anxiety is one of the major functions of communication when we interact with strangers’ (Gudykunst and Kim, 1997: 27), because it can lead to more accurate predictions and expectations about a stranger’s meaning and behavior.
Ting-Toomey emphasizes the interactive nature of intercultural communication in this definition, ‘the symbolic exchange process whereby individuals from two (or more) different cultural communities negotiate shared meanings in an interactive situation’ (1999: 16–17). Cultural communities are ‘groups of interacting individuals within a bounded unit who uphold a set of shared traditions and way of life’ (Ting-Toomey, 1999: 18). The symbols they use are verbal and nonverbal. The exchange process is an interdependent one—two cultural strangers find themselves in a mutually interdependent, transactional relationship in which they are simultaneously encoding and decoding messages that influence the other person’s communication. Furthermore, the intercultural process is irreversible (Barnlund, 1962) because receivers may not form the same impression of repeated messages, and they may not change their reaction to a communication the sender wants to ‘take back’ and edit. Shared meanings are negotiated in a creative, give-and-take process that involves adaptation and multiple levels of meaning (Ting-Toomey, 1999). The interactive situation refers to both concrete (physical setting, equipment, seating arrangements) and intangible or psychological features, (such as behavioral scripts, goals, motivations, norms, roles, social skills, etc.) (Burgoon, Buller, and Woodall, 1996).
The interaction of cross-cultural communication often faces barriers to success. ‘Unfortunately, more often than not, intercultural encounters are filled with misunderstandings and second guesses because of language problems, communication style differences, and value orientation differences’ (Ting-Toomey, 1999: 18). Accordingly, Gudykunst and Kim’s (1997) well-accepted intercultural communication model highlights the filters present in intercultural communication. Their model depicts messages and feedback flowing between Person A and Person B that are transmitted and interpreted through the filters of cultural, sociocultural (e.g. social identity) and psychocultural (e.g. attitudes) influences. These filters are mechanisms that delimit the number of alternatives used to transmit and interpret messages, thereby limiting the predictions made about how people from another culture might respond to communication behavior. The filters also delimit what stimuli are attended to and how incoming messages are interpreted. In the next section of the chapter we elucidate how these filters affect the communication process in global organizational learning.