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The benefit of Intercultural Relationships

Most of the people have numerous intercultural relationships which may include differences, age, gender, nationality, religion race, and ethnicity. The potential benefits and rewards in those relationships are incredible. The point to these intercultural relationships is often an exciting balance of similarities and differences. Hence, many benefits of intercultural relationships exist but the most crucial and major one is Acquiring Knowledge about other Cultures.

The intercultural relationship provides an individual the benefit to acquire knowledge about other culture/cultures. By having intercultural relationships, one can learn a lot about many unfamiliar cultures. The individual can learn about the cultural patterns, language, customs and beliefs of other cultures (Ting-Toomey, 2004). The intercultural relation can a vehicle that bring abstract terms to life as well such as culture or race and one can also acquire a lot about history if he/she is in an intercultural relationship.

Challenge of Intercultural Relationships

Intercultural Relationships are found unique in some ways and that is why they present some huge challenges. These challenges majorly include differences in language, communication style, perception, and values, etc. according to (Ting-Toomey, 2004), the major challenge that occurs in intercultural relationships is negative stereotyping. In intercultural relationships, stereotyping means the way of categorizing and processing information and views but specifically disadvantageous when they held strictly and they are undesirable and negative.

Strategies to Overcome Negative Stereotyping

Communication

Communication is the most important aspect of every relationship that makes things simple and easy. Individuals should learn each other’s language, beliefs, customs and the way one lives life. So a strong and effective communication would help to overcome the challenge as well as find a highly viable and promising solution.

Learn and Explore

Learning and exploring are the best ways through which the thoughts about negative stereotyping can be improved and intercultural relationships create the opportunity to learn and explore (Ting-Toomey, 2004). So learning and exploring can signify that an individual is more interested.

Improve Identity

Everyone should focus on putting his/her culture and cultural practices fully retained. So the individual in an intercultural relationship would not lose his/her culture and would be proud of. So the culture and its practices would be valued and viewed positively which would lead to the elimination of negative stereotyping (Ting-Toomey, 2004).

Comparison and Contrast of Conflict Styles

Both indirect conflict style and emotionally expressive conflict style encompass two noticeable sides of how meaning is created/generated. Beyond that, both of the conflict styles are associated with the reaction of someone towards any disagreement. The reaction or disagreements are communicated with thoughts and views in any conflictual issue or problem but some are communicated emotionally and somewhat directly while others indirectly communicate their disagreement without being so emotional at the time (Toomey, Joell, & Oetzel, 2011). In comparison, both emotional expressive conflict and indirect conflict styles contain central patterns of cultural or intercultural difference which have been inspected under more general cultural elements of both collectivism & individualism and low & high context communication patterns.

In contrast, communicator acts out through nonverbal behaviors like body stance, rolling eyes, voice tone, silence, and sighs, etc. indirect conflict style. While the communicators act out through affective and emotional reactions to the situation or person in emotional expressive conflict style. Most of the time, an individual focuses to overcome his/her fault and find his/herself well in indirect conflict style while people point fingers on others in emotional expressive conflict style (Toomey, Joell, & Oetzel, 2011).

Examples

In Asian culture, people mostly blame others for wrong deeds while people in Western culture focus to clarify the disagreement and accept if the problem has been occurred because of them.

The discussed styles vary to culture in the way that family heads (elders) of Asian culture show their disagreement through affective and shock & sorrow reactions to situations. While, elders of Western culture act out through nonverbal behaviors, particularly through body stance, voice tone, and eye-rolling.

References

Ting-Toomey, S. (2004). Managing conflict in intimate intercultural relationships. Conflict in personal relationships, 47-77.

Toomey, S., Joell, L. M., & Oetzel, J. G. (2011). Managing Intercultural Conflict Effectively. Sage.