High Context / Low Context Culture

As businesses continue to expand globally, employees are asked to partner with co-workers around the world. Building strong relationships is difficult enough when everyone is in the same location, but when separated thousands miles away, it requires taking time to understand cultural differences and adapt to those differences.

Recently I did a small research of “High context” “Low context”.
Wikipedia says, “It refers to a culture's tendency to use high-context messages over low-context messages in routine communication. This choice between speaking styles indicates whether a culture will cater to in-groups, an in-group being a group that has similar experiences and expectations, from which inferences are drawn. In a higher-context culture, many things are left unsaid, letting the culture explain. Words and word choice become very important in higher-context communication, since a few words can communicate a complex message very effectively to an in-group (but less effectively outside that group), while in a low-context culture, the communicator needs to be much more explicit and the value of a single word is less important.”

Lower-context cultures are: Australian, Dutch, English, Finnish, German, Israeli, New Zealand, Scandinavia, Switzerland, United States.

Higher-context cultures are: Arabic, Brazilian, Chinese, Filipinos, French, Greek, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Indian, Indonesian, Italian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Latin Americans, Nepali, Pakistani, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Southern United States, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, South Slavic, West Slavic.

What I am interested in is that Indian, Chinese and Japanese are in the same category. I am working closely with Chinese and Indian employees across Asia in Genpact, and feel cultural differences. But it reminds me that we tend to focus on the differences rather than similarity. It would be good to have balanced view when we discuss about culture.

I will continue to discuss about how to work with co-workers in the world from various angles going forward.