The Department of Management Studies in collaboration with CRC organized a guest lecture in the area of Business Communication & Management on "Cultural Sensitiveness & Behavioral Aspects in International Communication and Modern Forms of Communication" for the students of BBA Ist Year on 18th April 2018. The speaker for the lecture was Ms. Rashi Paliwal - Asst. Manager LEDVANCE Pvt. Ltd., Gurugram (Formerly known as OSRAM India Pvt. Ltd.). In her lecture, Ms. Paliwal discussed the basic model of communication subsumed with interactive activities to effectively discern the various steps. Talking about the encoding and decoding of messages and explaining that the theory of Noise extends to any distortion that may exist in the communication pathway which would include perceptions, attentiveness span, physiological state, semantic and language and also cultural diversity.
To better understand the concept, an activity was conducted where each students had to follow the instructions written in the slides to draw a figure in two different instances, the first instance had direct instructions regarding what to draw, the second had more intricate instructions, both the instructions were going towards creating a bird but a small set of students could achieve that, signifying how everyone had a cardinally varied cognitive approach to the activity. She talked about culture in detail, the organizational culture, the culture in which the organization works and the culture in which people works. She gave some personal examples about how things considered fine in India could be sigh of indecency in Germany giving the example of drinking water from a water bottle.
After that Ms. Paliwal explained the concepts of High-context and low-context cultures, these concepts were introduced by anthropologist Edward T. Hall in his 1976 book Beyond Culture. Countries like the US, the UK, Canada, Germany fall under the low context domain and Japan, China, Spain, France are high context. The difference between the two arises from behavioral aspects of certain variables. Low-context cultures have competitive, task oriented, individualistic, logical and rule oriented people.
High-context cultures have cooperative, relationship oriented, team oriented, intuitive people. Messages exchanged in a high-context culture carry implicit meanings with more information than actually spoken parts, while in low-context cultures, the messages have a clear meaning, with nothing implied beyond the words used. This can lead to conflict as she provided a precedent for it how in her company when she was in Germany for work related purposes, the Germans and the Chinese colleagues of hers were having issues communicating, as Germans were more to the point and confrontational and the Chinese were more implicit. Workshop were taken to address the issue and how adaptability can be improved.
Her session was a remarkable and a great learning opportunity for all the students, not just because of the audio- visual aids but because of her charismatic presentation skills as well. Her teaching techniques inclusive of the applicative concepts was a commendable experience for all the listeners to observe and absorb. A clear and firm erudition related to business communication.