Organizational Communication Barriers: Challenges in Businesses - Research Paper

Introduction

Organizational communication is where the members of an organization exchange views, ideas, and information outside or within an organization (Van et al., 2014). By organizational; communication, it does not only refer to the communication within the business set up but also in government agencies, academic institutions, hospitals, and military organizations. However, for the interest of this paper, the focus will be on Business communication barriers. All the organizations have some goals and stakeholders, and achieving these goals calls for effective communication between the stakeholder groups. Communication is, therefore, considered to be part and parcel of every organization. Organizational communication is culturally dependent and highly contextual, as individuals within an organization pass messages through writings, face-to-face, and mediated channels (Shrivastava, 2012). Human connection highly depends on communication. It is through communication that people work together with one another. Individuals have managed to construct societies for good life and endurance through the capacity to efficiently correspond. Moreover, communication is essential in administration since the success of any project highly depend on the usefulness of the staff to understand each other. Nevertheless, communication has, for a long time, remained a big problem in most of the organization.

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Effective Communication in Business

Communication is said to be effective when both the sender and the receiver of the message have a mutual perception of the message. The message should be audience-centered if it is to be perceived in the same sense, and this implies that the audience should be considered in any process of drafting messages for any communication to be effective. Griffin once said that "Effective communication is the process of sending a message in such a manner that the received message contains a meaning that is very close to the intended message" (Thomson et al., 2015). Here, the term meaning is used to imply the idea intended by the sender to be passed to the audience. Effective communication has the sole purpose of ensuring that the receiver of the information understands the message very clearly without any interference. The message must be conscious, clear, correct, complete, consistence, and courteous if effective communication is to be achieved in any way (Kei & Yazdanifard, 2015).

Outcomes of Communication Problems

The communication problems in management cannot be stamped out through interpersonal communication alone, and supposing that communication problems do not have undesired outcomes would be so naive. Any work environment usually experiences poor communication. Due to communications problems, a lot of inefficiencies arise within an organization (Odine, 2015). For example, take a case whereby a subordinate failed to send an important email to the manager, or where an order was not shipped on time because of a missed phone call. Such problems may include documents that need to be rewritten due to vagueness or emails that need to be certified. Due to poor communication, the employees will also get demoralized since employees inspiration, creativity, and productivity tend to get motivated by a highly collaborative and communicative environment (Obradovich et al., 2012).

The employees get demoralized when there are poor communications in an organization as they sit through boring presentations and receive unclear instructions from the communicators on projects, and this leads to monotony and confusion. Innovation is another major casualty or poor communication (Odine, 2015). If the company cannot make positive contributions to society, then its ability to make advances becomes marginalized and rendered null. The reason why this is critical is that for an organization to be innovative, it must be in a capacity to communicate directions and generate exciting improvements and ideas (Thomson et al., 2015).

Barriers in Communication Process

Physical and Environmental Barriers

These refer to the specific communication area of transmission. The contextual significance of communication dictates the particular zone of communication filtration. The overall spread of the message within an organization is primarily influenced by the physical barriers (Odine, 2015). The relevance of communication highly depends on the physical aspects, and in its absence, communication secrecy cannot be administered, and this is essential in keeping different functions parallelly working and controlling in terms of the feedback (Lunenburg, 2010). There are several classifications under the environmental barrier, as discussed below.

Time

The aspect of time is concerned with the development of speedy and quicker channels of communication. Any communication with someone needs to take the shortest time possible. In case of any delays in the communication process, then that is a barrier to communication. Whether the communication is done formally or informally, the aspect of time or speed is essential, and individuals or organizations need to come up with the fastest means of passing information such as the use of electronic mails or video conferencing (Shrivastava, 2012).

Space

There is always an unwanted distance existing within communication, and this space needs to be eliminated by all means. There are instances where the distance cannot be avoided, and the only way is to remove it, and one of the ways of doing this is, for example, through the use of telephones. For instance, in a situation where two people or parties want to communicate, and one is in Asia while the other is in Africa, then the use of telephone may not be beneficial, and they can use other effective means such as system email (Obradovich et al., 2012).

Place

This falls under the environment factor, and the region or the area in which the communication is occurring should be free of any form of destruction such as overcrowding, and it should be clear (Van et al., 2014). The place could possess barriers such as noise, which is an obvious barrier to communication, and it should be avoided by all means. A person cannot communicate efficiently in a place where there is noise. Therefore, for effective communication to take place, it needs to occur in areas with proper ventilation and fewer people.

Medium

The medium is another common barrier in communication. The medium is the form in which communication takes place, and these forms could have varying levels of effectiveness depending on other organizational factors. Communication could either take place orally, through video, audio, written, informal, or formal. For there to be effective communication, the medium used for communication should be precise, accurate, and understandable (Thomson et al., 2015).

Emotional Barriers

These are the barriers that are directly related to the emotions of either the receiver of the message or the sender. In most cases, communication is an emotional draft, and this implies that emotions could have a significant impact on our communications. Humans are made up of a collection of emotions, and often, communication is an outburst of a given emotion, making it a barrier in the communication process. People grow with emotions from their childhood, and they are a mixture of feelings such as hatred, fear, mistrust, love, and trust, that affects them as they grow up and end up affecting them even in their adulthood (Shrivastava, 2012). The emotions synchronize, and they influence the individuals up to their adulthood, making it a barrier in communication.

Cultural Barriers

Organizations are made up of individuals from the different cultural background. These people have to communicate regularly if they are to achieve a common organizational goal (Odine, 2015). However, due to their differences in culture, this becomes a barrier in communication, adversely affecting the effectiveness of information delivery. Culture is a much broader term aggregated to by other elements such as religion, nationalities, races, creeds, and ethnicities, and all these have impacts on communication effectiveness within an organization. Organizations need to create cultural awareness among their employees to overcome the barrier of cultural differences (Odine, 2015). It is important understanding and accepting other peoples' culture in the form of communication.

Psychological Barriers

The mindset and mental capacity of those engaged in a communication process are critical in organizational communication. The communicator needs to understand the mindset and mental capacity of his or her audience, and the receiver also needs to do the same to the sender (Lunenburg, 2010). The process of communication will eventually not be effective, for example, if someone was communicating with another individual or a group of people with disinterest or unwillingness to listen to the message. These could be as a result of the attitude that the listeners have formed against the speaker or due to their mental capacities. Therefore, organizations should work on improving the psychological impacts of effective communication. In an organizational setting, workers could be psychologically affected due to several reasons such as lack of motivation from the management, delayed salaries, or poor working conditions, among other factors. When such eventualities occur, the psychology of the workers get negatively impacted, and in the long run, communication suffers.

Perception of Reality

The perception of those within an organization, either on a manager or the general organization, could be a barrier to effective communication. It is critical to understand various perceptions of an issue or perception when communicating (Kei & Yazdanifard, 2015). When communicating about a given issue, topic, dilemma, concept, stress, or condition, different levels of perceptions are involved. It becomes a barrier if you lack an understanding of the different perception levels. Gaining the perception of reality is vital to implement effective communication, and this means that knowledge, facts, actuality, and figures, and the truth should be acquired.

Language Barriers

Language is the most effective means that people use in communicating with others. It is through the language that people can comprehend the content of the message that other people are passing to them through communication (Jenifer & Raman, 2015). The objective of communication is fulfilled, and the communication only becomes effective when two people of parties communicate through the use of a common language that all the people in that circle understand. Proper communication within an organization requires the development and use of a common language that would allow all the members of the groups to understand each other to work towards achieving the goals of the organization collectively.

However, in a situation where everybody can not understand the language used in an organization, then this becomes a language barrier, and it may lead to inefficiencies within the organization, which may then lead to failure or lack of productivity (Jenifer & Raman, 2015). A good example of language as a barrier to effective communications; let us take the case of an international student from China who has gone to the United States of America for studies. The student may not be conversant with the American national language, which is English, and this becomes a barrier. However, to overcome this barrier, most of the US institutions have come up with bridging courses to teach the English language to those learning it as their second language.

Physical Barriers

The structure of an organization requires individuals to wor...