Relationships

There are many challenges within intercultural relationships that take time to explain, negotiate, and work through. All relationships are hard work and require constant upkeep to combat the challenges that threaten them. It's no exaggeration to say that we develop and maintain relationships through communication. Incorrect interpretations of messages can lead to misunderstanding, uncertainty, frustration, and conflict, but the potential rewards include gaining new cultural knowledge, broadening one's worldview, and breaking stereotypes.

Types of Intercultural Communication Competence

People who have developed good communication skills are often described as having communication competence. A previous chapter has already explored intercultural communication competence, but researcher Owen Hargie proposed that there were four levels of intercultural communication competence based on the ideas of competence and incompetent communication as well as conscious or unconscious communication.

Unconsciously incompetent is the "be yourself" approach. This person may not have a strong knowledge of cultural differences and does not see any need to accommodate differences in communication styles or culture. They may not even be aware they are communicating in an incompetent manner.

Once people learn more about culture and communication, they may become consciously incompetent. This is where they have the vocabulary to identify the concepts, and know what they should be doing, but they are not communicating as well as they could. Many of us have experienced the feeling that something isn't quite right, yet we can't quite figure out what went wrong.

As our communication skills increase, and our focus is on cultural concepts and communication styles, we become a consciously competent communicator. We know that we are communicating well in the moment, and we can add this memory our growing bank of successful intercultural interactions.

Unconscious competence is the level to achieve. Unconscious competence means that we can communicate successfully without straining to be competent. At this point all the knowledge and previous experiences have been put into practice, and we rarely have to intently focus on our intercultural interactions because it has become second nature. We have developed the skills needed to be competent.