Читать книгу Going Abroad 2014 - Waldemar A. Pfoertsch - Страница 16

Even more than perception and interpretation, cultural conditioning strongly affects evaluation. Evaluation involves judging whether someone or something is good or bad. Cross-culturally, you use your own culture as a standard of measurement, judging that which is like your own culture as normal and good and everything, which is different as abnormal and bad. Your own culture becomes a self-reference criterion: since no other culture is identical to your own, you tend to judge all other cultures as inferior. A common mistake made by Americans for example is that they affiliate with personnel or business contacts because they speak English. It is totally wrong to assume that speaking your language indicates intelligence, business know-how or local competence; it is only an indication of language skills. Evaluation rarely helps in trying to understand or communicate with people from another culture.

To sum it up, what you should consider to have an effective cross-cultural communication is to assume difference until similarity is proven rather than the reverse, instead of interpreting or evaluating a situation you should just observe what is actually said and done and try to see a foreign situation through the eyes of your foreign colleagues (role reversal) and last but not least once you develop an explanation for a situation, treat this explanation as a guess and not as a certainty and check it with other foreign and home country colleagues to find out whether it is plausible.