elopment of effective intercultural communication within the organization (Thomas, 1993, pp. 169 194. Communication within an organization is not simply a matter of people and groups learning to speak to one another or to convey ideas to one another. On a more important level, such communication is the building of trust between the communicating parties (Goff, 1990, pp. 459 467). It is only when such trust is established that meaningful progress may occur.
In an intercultural environment, the greatest barriers to the development of trust and, therefore, the development of effective communications are ethnocentric attitudes and attempts by a majority to impose a cultural imperialism. Ethnocentrism is a tendency to judge other people or groups by the standards and practices of one's own culture or ethnic group, and, as a consequence, to view people from outside one's own culture with disfavor, and to regard one's own culture, race, or ethnic group as inherently superior to all others. For Japanese managers operating an American manufacturing plant, the issue of ethnocentrism becomes a double edged sword. The majority of the people in the plant will be white Americans, and white Americans are quite possibly the most ethnocentric people living in the contemporary period (Lipset, 1993, pp. 330 347). The American workers at the electronics manufacturing plant, thus, will tend to resist any attempts to change practices that they consider to be the best way to do things simply because they are perceived as being the "American way." At the same time, however, the Japanese managers must resist their tendencies to simply impose their own policies and procedures through a type of cultural imperialism, which they may feel to be their prerogatives as owners and managers of the facility (Ford and Honeycutt, 1992, pp. 27 34).
Historically, ethnocentrism on the part of a population majority has been manifested in racial and ethnic discrimi...