The advantage of globalization in business sector has resulted open place for global workplace for professionals and young job seekers. As the impact, culture differences are more likely to appear, especially in daily communication, where more time are spent in the workplace working with local employee. This phenomenon has lead intercultural interaction to become more important in recent years. From the perspective of leadership, the problem lies primarily in communication. To date, there are no previous studies focus on interaction between German and Indonesian alone, especially in in workplace settings. More phenomenological studies are needed as a learning tool for both expatriates and local employee, or even individuals who are preparing to work with German or Indonesian. Frictions in a diverse society could have been avoided if more effort was spent in establishing good relationships, effective communication, and having the knowledge and understanding of the culture itself. . The research has found that the experience from respondents have been largely confirmed the Hofstede’s Cultural Dimension. For examples, the local employees exhibit high power distance within a very collective society, and they seem to be more feminine rather than masculine. In regards with the uncertainty avoidance, the respondents perceived that the local employee dislike ambiguity but on the other hand, they also dislike rules. The result also found that there are some inconsistencies between the answer from the respondents and the actual score from the Hofstede’s Cultural Index for the last two indexes, the Long Term vs Short Term and Indulgence vs Restrain.

Keywords: intercultural communication, communication barriers, German expat, Indonesian, workplace.