A Multidimensional Approach to Studying Cultural Differences & Coping Strategies in a Multinational Coalition Environment

Current and future coalition operations increasingly involve collaboration on operations beyond the traditional battlespace. The challenge is to communicate effectively among multinational teams and to understand each nation's developed communication culture. During multinational collaboration, communications are often via electronic networks. This, as a result, removes physical presence and rich context information with the important verbal, behavioural and cultural cues that are often vital to appropriately interpreting the content of the information. In addition, communication preferences, customs, variations in language use and other linguistic and cultural characteristics may create barriers between nations, even without electronic mediation. In this paper, we propose a multidimensional approach, which would capture major aspects of cross-cultural communication and provide a systematic and a comprehensive method for studying communication preferences and peculiarities in the light of cultural differences. More specifically, we propose to analyze data from cross-cultural, cognitive, and linguistic perspectives. Our approach will identify crucial elements involved in cross-cultural communication. Our approach will also discuss overall and individual strategies in collaborating, which can serve as a basis for training to improve multinational communication effectiveness