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Abstract: The mission to promote national unity has become more strenuous with the decline of intercultural engagement among multicultural students in Malaysian public universities. Underpinned by Anxiety/Uncertainty Management (AUM) theory, this article examines barriers to intercultural communication by integrating ethnocentrism as an additional barrier. Based on a quantitative approach, 449 valid responses were collected from undergraduates from five public universities in Malaysia. Partial-least-squares software (SmartPLS3) was used to test the proposed relationships. The findings reveal that anxiety, uncertainty, and ethnocentrism have a significant negative relationship with intercultural communication.
Keywords: Anxiety/Uncertainty Management (AUM) theory, ethnocentrism, intercultural communication, undergraduates.
1.Introduction
Malaysia is one of the most multicultural countries in Southeast Asia (Azlan, Kee & Abdullah 2018) with three major ethnic groups: Malay, Chinese and Indian (Chang & Kho 2017). Since its independence in 1957, Malaysia has always been struggling to introduce concepts able to promote "unity in diversity" to form a national identity (Yusof & Esmaeil 2017). Although education policies are expected to play the key role in fostering national integration, existing studies indicate that intercultural communication in higher education institutions is still limited and not up to satisfactory level (Tamam 2013; Tamam et al. 2013) To worsen the situation, most university students prefer socializing with their friends and peers from the same ethnic group (Hashmi et al. 2017). Instead of being an avenue for uniting students, Malaysian public universities are in danger of being breeding grounds for intolerance, ethnocentrism, and segregated communities (Mustapha et al. 2009).
There is considerable evidence that intercultural communication often creates chaos among higher-learning-institution students coming from diverse cultural backgrounds (Holmes 2005). Uncertainty is considered to be the primary factor that affects intercultural communication (Novinger 2001). Neuliep (2015) explains that communication with someone from a different cultural background can be frightening and can be worsened by uncertainty. A concept that is strongly associated with uncertainty is anxiety. Interaction with people from a different culture often leads to anxiety, which sometimes causes individuals to avoid initiating interaction (Logan, Steel & Hunt 2015).
Underlying the present research is Bill Gudykunst's (1995) Anxiety/Uncertainty Management (AUM) theory. AUM theory identifies uncertainty and anxiety towards other cultures as playing a major role in intercultural communication. According to Gudykunst, to communicate effectively, people from different cultural backgrounds...