ABSTRACT
Communication is central to successful intercultural encounters and work of any kind, be it for travelling, interpersonal interactions or international business. Unfortunately, speaking the other party’s language is not sufficient to guarantee successful interactions, and many of the discrepancies in communication are due to pragmatic differences and cultural preferences for particular ways of communicating, with language functioning merely as a tool (Stadler, 2011). As interactional partners rarely completely align in their views and goals, managing intercultural interactions and transactions is particularly prone to conversational conflict. The particularly high propensity for conflict in intercultural communication is documented in studies such as Spencer-Oatey and Xing (2008), which investigated business deals that went awry on the grounds of culture-based conflicts. The tendency for intercultural contact to lead to more, and more complex, conflict situations is also documented by Elmer (1993) and von Glinow et al. (2004). Conflict is not conducive to successful interactions and it need not come in the shape of a complete breakdown to adversely affect communication and relationships. Previous research demonstrated clearly that different cultures have starkly different orientations to disagreement and approaches to managing conversational conflict situations (Stadler, 2013a). Hence, it is imperative to gain a better understanding of culture-based attitudes towards conflict, as well as the cultural variables that underlie them, in order to arrive at smoother relations and more successful interactions and transactions across cultures.
