Communication course helps hotel students in cultural understanding

By Linda Myers

Communication -- the art of speaking and writing clearly and with impact -- seems more needed than ever, given the flash points for cultural misunderstanding that are setting off sparks around the globe.

One pertinent course, Communication and the Multicultural Organization, taught by Susan Bryson, lecturer in business communication at Cornell's School of Hotel Administration, seeks to teach juniors and seniors to observe and understand the communication styles of people from different cultures -- not just what people say but the context from which their words and actions spring.

Cornell senior Amy Nguyen, left, interviews University of Binghamton doctoral student Soyeon Kim outside the Statler Hotel Nov. 15 for Nguyen's major project in the course Communication and the Multicultural Organization, while Soyeon's daughter, Jaein Jung, 3, waits for her turn. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

The course is one of many on managerial communication at the Hotel School. All of the school's 850 undergraduates take two required courses focusing on specific communication challenges of hospitality managers, said Judi Brownell, professor of organizational communication. In addition, "elective courses like the one Susan teaches not only help hone students' communication skills but promote greater global understanding," Brownell noted.

"Especially in the hospitality industry, whether managers are dealing with their work force or with clientele, they are working in a multicultural environment," said Bryson. "Intercultural communication competence is vital because people's communication styles are really culturally bound."

Some cultures have a polychronic sense of time, she explained, where "everything can happen at once," whereas in the United States, events are seen to happen in an orderly linear sequence. Similarly, in high-context cultures, the meaning of someone's words is derived from the environment in which the words are spoken. If the relationship between speaker and listener is close, "people may not need to explain a lot, because so much is understood." In contrast, in a low-context culture like the United States, we look mainly to the words themselves for meaning, she said.

"You get into sensitive areas when you talk about culture," warned Bryson. To avoid slipping into stereotyping, "we talk about the bell curve of a culture, with people in the center representing the mainstream," but also try to be aware that cultures are made up of individuals whose behavior can vary greatly, she said.

To prepare for the course's major project, a study of how culture influences the way people from other countries communicate, the class used the text Intercultural Communication in the Global Workplace, by Linda Beamer and Iris Varner. The book includes results of Geert Hofstede's 1980 study of international IBM employees, which outlines five dimensions of culture, among them individualist versus collectivist values (personal achievements versus those for the greater good) and cultures with varying degrees of power distance (high power distance means those with more power are seen as less approachable). Students then were assigned to interview graduate students enrolled in conversational English as a Second Language classes. They brainstormed in class on questions that might elicit answers shaped by different cultural norms, which they were to analyze in a lengthy paper.

Hotel School senior Shannon Prichard, who interviewed Ruben Ortiz, a Cornell graduate student from Puerto Rico, expected that his communication style would be influenced by Latin America's high-context, collectivist culture, but found instead that he identified more with the United States' low-context, individualist culture. He responded to her questions directly, accurately and with speed, used many facts and told few stories, Prichard observed. In addition, he took full credit for his academic accomplishments and emphasized his independence from his family, traits most commonly found in low-context cultures like the United States. Still, he mentioned family and friends often, Prichard noted, a trait associated with cultures that place a high value on interpersonal relationships. And while he showed up for the interview on the dot, he said adjusting to U.S. punctuality took getting used to.

Hotel School senior Neera Chanani, who spoke with Atsuhiro Dodo, a Cornell doctoral student from Japan, found the interview validated most of what she had learned about Japanese culture. She wrote: "When I read about how the Japanese live in a collectivist society, want to 'save face" and have a high-context culture, I thought of it as all very theoretical and distant. I never imagined that I would witness nearly all those qualities and behaviors in someone's normal conversation and actions."

She also predicted that although most Japanese are said to have high uncertainty avoidance -- avoiding situations with uncertain outcomes -- Dodo would not, because he had been bold enough to move to the United States on his own to work, study and improve his English. That guess turned out to be right.

And Hotel School senior Amy Nguyen, who interviewed Soyeon Kim, a Korean doctoral student at the University of Binghamton, wrote: "Soyeon discussed how the students in Korea are so respectful of their professors that they never talk back to them, which represents high power distance. Here she sometimes feels intimidated by the fact that American students do not hesitate to question the teacher's authority on a daily basis."

The course also teaches intercultural communication lessons through such fun team exercises as trying to communicate without words, simulating speaking in an unfamiliar language and observing how it affects eye contact and other nonverbal communication clues.

The material is livened with movie clips on multicultural communication challenges and with guest lecturers such as Yasamin DiCiccio Miller, director of the Computer Assisted Survey Team (CAST) in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Miller, who has consulted in the United Arab Emirates, spoke this fall about communicating with people from Muslim cultures.

Miller, who was born in Baghdad but grew up in Canada, said that while Muslim societies are essentially collectivist, people's behavior not only can vary from country to country but can be influenced by class, level of education and rural vs. city roots as well as the regimes in power.

"Many interculturalists stress that to understand a foreign culture, people first need to look at their own," said Bryson. When her class examined culturally shaped perceptions in the United States, "I could see the light bulbs going off for one student. Later she told me it hadn't occurred to her until that moment that her thinking about time was culturally influenced."