Culture has been a pervasive part of humanity since the beginning of civilization. Wood (2010), a professor of communication, defines culture as “the totality of beliefs, values, understandings, practices, and ways of interpreting experience shared by a number of people” (p 78). As I see it, culture shapes an individual and creates his or her worldview. Each culture emphasizes an important aspect of humans and shows the complexities of our species. Although culture includes many elements, I will discuss one of Hofstede's cultural dimensions, individualism, and explain how it creates a high- or low-context culture. Hofstede stated that there are five important dimensions seen in each culture, which include power distance index, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance index, and long-term orientation. What I find most important is individualism, or the degree to which individuals are integrated into the group (http://www.geert-hofstede.com/). Individualism impacts whether a culture is high-context, emphasizing the cultural context of a message, or low-context, emphasizing explicit content (Rothwell, 2010). With individualism, you can have a collectivistic or individualistic society. Collectivism creates more of a “we orientation” where the group discourages individual success and encourages the success of the entire group. I believe this makes it easier to create a cohesive group as competition will automatically be stifled. However, it would be naive to assume that competition does not exist within a collectivistic group. Because of the emphasis on relationship building, collectivistic groups will be more attuned to interpersonal communication. In fact, "children of culture are more independent, there is a need to have a low context culture. Individualism creates more subjectivity which leads to different meanings within a context. situation To eliminate ambiguity, members of this society must explicitly verbalize all the details, unlike a collectivistic society. This would be helpful at the beginning of the meeting, however as it progresses of time it will become repetitive and unnecessary. There are many different cultures that impact a group, however, each culture creates a beneficial environment for its members. One should not become ethnocentric and claim that one's culture is better than others, this will limit their mindset on the positive aspects that each culture brings to the productivity of the group. No culture can thrive if it tries to be exclusive” to which I add “no group can thrive if it tries to limit cultural diversity..”