The Office has an episode that fits perfectly with intercultural communication. It actually happens in the second episode of the first season: “Diversity day”. In the first scene, an outsider comes in to give a presentation about diversity in the workplace, but Michael does not like the way he runs it, so he decides to create his own versión of Diversity Day.

 

Michael has everyone in the office choose an index card to put on their head, and on every index card Michel wrote a nationality and the workers don't know what it is. They are required to conversate with the people around them and speak to them, basically forcing his employees to call out stereotypes generalization about groups of people that are applies to individual members of those groups of each ethnicity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Before Michael starts the meeting, Kelly (who is Indian), tells Michael she cannot participate because she has a customer waiting. He is not happy with this and begins to say "Without you, we will only have two..." but then stops himself knowing what he was saying was offensive. What he meant by this was that there would only be two people that were not considered "white" in the group. He is refering to Stanley, who is African American, and Oscar who is Mexican. He makes these three people an "out-group" because they have a different skin color and ethnicity.

 

This shows that Michael has not got a low intercultural sensitivity. We can deduce that Michael is still in the ethnocentric stages of denial, defense and minimization where his mindset presumes the superiority of his own worldview. Even though his main objective is to acknowledge the diversity in the office, attempting to make the office as a whole a closer in-group.