A Pilot Study on Cross Cultural Communication of Thai Expatriate Managers working in Taiwan-Based Thai Organizations

[[abstract]]With the on going of the competitive world, one of the developing countries, Thailand, is now overwhelmingly confronted with globalization and obligatory has to conduct business with various countries around the world in order to survive in this contentious era. Recently, not only Thailand encouraged and welcomed the foreign direct investment companies to conduct their business in Thailand, but also sent a lot of potential multinational companies abroad in order to revive its economy. Thai people, formerly familiar with working only Thai way may be now in a state of confusion because they must adjust themselves to new working environments where they communicate with people from different cultures in multi-national companies. This pilot study explored the cross cultural communication issues of Thai expatriate managers working with Taiwanese employees in Taiwan R.O.C. The purpose is to find out the similarities and differences of Thai and Taiwanese national cultures that affect the communication in the workplace, and how they handle with those cross cultural communicational issues. Moreover, the researcher places an emphasis on human resource professionals and organizations to understand the importance of development needed to assist expatriates before departure in order to understand the overall cross-cultural issues. Not only the qualitative in-depth interviews were employed to explore those significant matters, but also the multiple cases were then proceeded to observe the differences in communication of Thai expatriate managers who work in Taiwan R.O.C. The pilot research primarily finds that Thai expatriate managers do not face many difficulties of having communication with Taiwanese employees. Due to the fact that there are some similarity between Thai and Taiwanese cultures, which will not be a major cause that can have the influence on their communicational styles. Moreover, the influences of cultural differences are reducing on account of having such an openly internationalized workplace. Besides, the study also finds that there is no huge conflict between Thai expatriate managers and Taiwanese employees since Taiwanese local employees do follow the Chinese cultures and norms which are mostly concerned with the hierarchical concept.