Receiver-related Intercultural Communication Barriers to Organizational Learning

While the sender may encounter barriers to communicating information and knowledge to others for the reasons outlined above, the other part of the communication dyad is the receiver. Both the organization and individuals within the organization are potential receivers of information and knowledge critical to organizational learning.

There are two major factors that can affect the receptivity of both organizations and individuals: cosmopolitanism and satisficing behaviors.

Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism is an attitudinal stance or mindset that indicates an orientation toward the outside world (Merton, 1957). As originally conceived, it emphasized people who are oriented towards the outside world, and contrasted them with ‘locals’ who are more focused on local affairs (Merton, 1957). While later this was expanded to include a distinction between those in organizations who are oriented to a reference group outside the firm (Gouldner, 1957; 1958), it is this original external orientation to the world upon which we will draw. With increasing globalization, the concept of cosmopolitanism has received renewed attention, with an added emphasis on a willingness to engage with the external world. Some researchers (e.g. Levy, Beechler, Taylor, and Boyacigiller, 2007) identify cosmopolitanism as one of the two essential characteristics of global mindset. Hannerz (1996: 103) describes cosmopolitanism in this fashion:

A more genuine cosmopolitanism is first of all an orientation, a willingness to engage with the other. It entails an intellectual and esthetic openness toward divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts rather than uniformity. To become acquainted with more cultures is to turn into an aficionado, to view them as artworks. At the same time, however, cosmopolitanism can be a matter of competence . . . a personal ability to make one’s way into other cultures, through listening, looking, intuiting, and reflecting.

Cosmopolitanism can thus be seen as related to a key concept in intercultural communication called mindfulness. According to Thich (1991), this term means attending to one’s internal assumptions, cognitions, and emotions, and simultaneously being attuned to the other’s assumptions, cognitions, and emotions. It also involves being open to novelty and unfamiliar behavior (Ting-Toomey, 1999: 267–8). Langer wrote that mindfulness involves learning to (1) see behavior or information presented in the situation as novel or fresh; (2) view a situation from several vantage points or perspectives; (3) attend to the context and the person in which we are perceiving the behavior; and (4) create new categories through which this new behavior may be understood (1997: 111). In addition, cosmopolitanism at the organizational level can be seen as related to Kim’s (1993) concept of organizational intrusiveness, or the willingness of the organization to look outside itself, as well as to Cohen and Levinthal’s (1990) concept of absorptive capacity, which is the ability of an organization to recognize the value of new, external information and integrate it into existing knowledge.

In sum, the cosmopolitanism of the receiver is an important attitude that can influence the effectiveness of communication in global organizational learning. If a receiver at HQ (or HQ as a whole) is not interested in the external environment and not willing to engage with it, it is likely that he or she will ignore incoming communication as irrelevant to the local concerns. It is not that the receiver has a prejudice per se against externally generated knowledge, but simply a lack of interest in it. Similarly, entire work units or divisions may be so locally oriented that they are uninterested in knowledge generated elsewhere. In either case, the receiver misses potentially valuable input by failing to seek information relevant to organizational learning from external (i.e. external to their own site) sources due to a lack of interest and curiosity.

Satisficing

Satisficing is the second factor that influences receivers. In decision making this term refers to accepting a decision that is ‘good enough’ because the costs of maximizing are too great (Simon, 1976). In an intercultural context, we find satisficing in two areas—the plateauing that occurs in both language acquisition and cultural understanding (Osland, 1995: Osland and Bird, 2000). When these skills are good enough to get by, some people stop learning. There is no motivation to reach a higher level of fluency or understanding until a trigger event occurs, which initiates another round of cultural sense making (Osland and Bird, 2001) or a return to the dictionary or language teacher.

In terms of organizational learning, satisficing occurs when firms or individuals assume they understand enough to get by and be effective in a global context. MNCs that are not experiencing negative business results in foreign markets, or who are protected from the consequences of negative business results by subsidies at home, may feel satisfied with the level of cultural knowledge they possess. It can be argued that until the late 1980s many Japanese MNCs had high levels of satisficing behavior with regard to intercultural communication. The economic recession that began in the early 1990s and continues into the second decade of the new century, and the problems many Japanese MNCs have faced with overseas operations, such as Matsushita’s troubles in Hollywood in the 1990s or Toyota’s failure to listen to complaints about unexpected acceleration, have caused a re-examination of their level of intercultural understanding.

Individuals can also exhibit satisficing behaviors, particularly when their focus is restricted to short-term business goals. A US technical manager in a US MNC’s subsidiary in China may have learned enough language and cultural knowledge to get by on a day-to-day basis when that country was still at an early stage of market opening, with few highly qualified engineers available. That manager may not realize fifteen years later that the skills and knowledge of the young Chinese engineers he or she is working with are considerably more sophisticated. Because the US technical manager is still using a set of behaviors that was good enough to get by in the short term, that manager is unlikely to recognize that the information environment around him or her has changed unless a trigger event, such as widespread resignations, occurs to jolt the manager out of complacency. Whether the manager responds to the trigger event depends in part on his or her level of readiness to continue learning about the particular work setting and the other culture.