Intercultural Communication Competence: A Phenomenology Study Of Indonesian Diaspora In Germany

Nation, culture, and society exert tremendous influence on each our live, structuring our values, engineering our view of the world and patterning our responses to experience. No human being can hold him/herself apart from some form of cultural influence. Yet, the condition of human being is very highly adaptive within a new environment. But when it comes to huge gap of cultural differences between Asian and Western cultures, it would go rough. Hence culture is extremely complex, varying along many dimensions, no doubt culture is a communication problem because it is not constant, it is a variable. There are many variables in communication process whose values are determined, at least in part, by culture. These variables have the ability to influence the perceptions and to affect the meaning in order to assign to communicative acts. This paper is going to acknowledge the intercultural communication of Indonesians who lives in Germany. Using phenomenological study, it wants to reveal how the situation can be harmonized and how the Indonesian Diaspora can adapt to host culture without losing their cultural identity. Moreover, cultural identity is an image of the self and the culture intertwined in the individual’s total conception of reality. This image, a patchwork of internalized roles, rules, and norms, functions as the coordinating mechanism in personal and interpersonal situations. In this research the Indonesian Diaspora are co-orienting and coordinating their behaviors to accomplish social functions, obtain personal goals, and conform to the normative expectations of the situations. As Spitzberg & Cupach (1984) rightly point out of being competent communicators, with an expanded conceptualization; which include motivation (affective, emotion) knowledge (cognitive), skills (behavioral, actional), context (situation, environment, culture, relationship, function) and outcomes (perceived appropriateness, perceived effectiveness, satisfaction, understanding, attraction, intimacy, assimilation, task achievement). And these components can only be influenced through education, experience and guided practice