low-context culture

The individuals from high- and low-context cultures also differ in their communication styles.

People from low-context cultures value facts, figures, and candor.

An individual from a low-context culture needs to adapt and/or be accommodated when shifting to a higher-context culture.

Managers from a high context culture will have developed sensitivities to possible non-verbal cues which go unnoticed or are ignored by low-context cultures.

Low-context cultures are characterised by the predominance of verbal communication; little reliance is placed upon the background context in which the words are used.

HR agents in low-context cultures are more likely to hire direct, assertive, and somewhat aggressive candidates, whereas the reverse pattern is observed in high-context cultures.

High-context culture and the contrasting low-context culture are terms presented by the anthropologist Edward T. Hall in his 1976 book Beyond Culture.

For example, Hall goes on to explain that low-context cultures assume that the individuals know very little about what they are being told, and therefore must be given a lot of background information.

According to Hall, high-context cultures such as Chinese tend to stress the use of internalised or implicit message while low-context cultures tend to emphasise the use of explicit messages.

As Gao and Ting-Toomey suggest, Chinese culture seems to pay attention to qing (reciprocity and feelings of obligation) and guanxi (relationship building), while in low-context cultures such a stress tends to be missing.

The authors also described India as a relatively low-context culture, arguing that Indians' communication style, while observant of hierarchical differences as is standard for higher-context societies, is much more explicit and verbose than those of East Asians.

Words and word choice become very important in higher-context communication, since a few words can communicate a complex message very effectively to an in-group (but less effectively outside that group), while in a low-context culture, the communicator needs to be much more explicit and the value of a single word is less important.