South Korea
- This is a preview of the essay.
To view the full text you must login!
Communication
Korea is one of many countries labeled as a high context culture. High context communication is characterized by physical, non-verbal communication without reliance on encoded verbal cues. In high context culture, like Korea, the environment contains much of the message. Mood, expressions, the situation, even silence itself all provide large piece to the communication puzzle. Members of high context cultures, who by nature verbalize less, are sometimes viewed as mysterious, intriguing or even sneaky and untrustworthy, because their intentions are not often clearly expressed in words. (Saccone, 1994)
In addition, because much of the message is in the context, Koreans rarely come directly to the point verbally. They expect others to decipher their meaning without such directness, which they consider somewhat offensive or uncultured. (Saccone, 1994)
If forced to verbalize, the indirect approach is again employed, talking around a difficult subject expecting the receiver to decipher the message long before it's necessary to come to the point. This can be tiring for foreigners, especially during fact-finding discussions or during negotiations. Americans in particular, like to come to the point quickly and resolve issues directly...