Intercultural Communication Challenges in East-East Encounters

We analyse challenges in East-East intercultural communication between Japanese expatriates and Chinese employees, adopting a mixed methods exploratory sequential design with qualitative interviews and a quantitative survey. Whereas Japan and China are considered high-context cultures with cultural similarities, our results suggest that Japanese expatriates’ lack of communication explicitness and cosmopolitan openness to Chinese perspectives impede Chinese employees’ trust. Drawing on the communication literature, we formally theorise that how (communication explicitness) and what (cosmopolitan openness) expatriates communicate can affect local employees’ trust, in East- East encounters and more generally. Our study highlights the limitation of a “cultural differences”-based approach to intercultural communication.