One of the biggest dangers in communication is to assume that communication has taken place. Most of us indeed make a great effort in formulating ideas, and finding appropriate words for communicating them to others. In an organisation, considerable money and energy are spent to develop a system of communication. And yet, if you assess the effectiveness of communication in terms of the desired response, you will be surprised at the results. You may logically ask: What causes failure of communication? How can we make communication more effective to bring about a desired change?
The failure in communication is caused by barriers between the sender and the receiver. To make communication effective, it must be ensured that these barriers areremoved/overcome. Now-a-days media has become very powerful only because it has devised ways to reach the target audience. The barriers either prevent the communication from reaching the receiver or distort it in such a manner that it ends up either as non-communication or as miscommunication. Since a manager has to use communication as a means of getting work done through his/her subordinates, s/he must ensure that the barriers are minimized.The barriers that interfere with the understanding of the communication are of three kinds: semantic, psychological and organisational. We now discuss these one by one.
Semantic Barriers
Most difficulties in communication arise because the same word or symbol signifies different things to different individuals. You may recall how Shiny Abraham was disqualified and lost her gold medal, despite coming first by a very wide margin in the 800 m race, at the Asian Games at Seoul (1986). She had crossed the track at the place where she should not have done. According to her, she mistook the symbol, i.e., the colour of the flag. In our country, the red flag indicates danger but in South Korea, white flag is used for the same purpose. Words, action or a feeling, can have several meanings. For example, abstract words like merit, effectiveness or responsibility, can be interpreted differently by different persons. Difficulty in understanding may arise even in the case of words which have different contextual meanings in different regions/countries. To give you an example, a problem arose in interpreting the meaning of the word ‘steps’. In a training programme of health workers relating to family health in Jamaica, this question was asked: “What are some of the steps that a mother should take to make sure that her baby keeps healthy?” There was no response to this question because the trainees were accustomed to only one meaning of the word ‘steps’ based on their experience; they just could not make any sense of the question.Communication Semantic difficulty also arises because of unfamiliarity with words, for example, a word of Skills and a foreign language or a technical word.
Motivation
An effective communication is one which uses words appropriate to the environment and mental framework of the receiver. This ensures that communication is grasped properly and implemented effectively. Read the following story to understand this point:A proposal for raising the salaries of the faculty members of an agricultural college was under discussion. The farmers’ block was totally against giving the raise to the college teachers – they could not see why they should pay those college teachers $5000 a year just for talking 12 to 15 hours a week. Faculty representatives made no headway in their negotiations until one of them who had some farming experience, got an inspiration.
“Gentlemen”, he told the members of the administrative body, “a college teacher is like a little bull. It is not the amount of time he spends. It is the importance of what he does!”The faculty members got the raise.Semantic barrier can also be created if body language is inconsistent with the verbal communication. A manager who praises the honesty and sincerity of his/her subordinate in a sarcastic tone creates doubts in the minds of the subordinate as to the course of action s/he should adopt in a given situation in future. The same kind of barrier is created by a divergence between the verbal language and the action language of the superiors. When action and language are used jointly, the actions often have more powerful influence on other’s actions than words. A management may, for example, profess its belief in being guided solely by the merit of employees while making promotions. But if employees observe that, in actual practice, promotions are made on considerations other than merit, the management’s professed policy is bound to be affected by a semantic barrier.
Psychological Barriers
Psychological barriers are the prime barriers in inter-personal communication. The meaning that is ascribed to a message depends upon the emotional or psychological status of both the parties concerned. As such, the psychological barriers may be set up either by the receiver or the sender of the message.You have already seen that the effectiveness of any communication depends upon the perception of the right meaning of the message by the receiver.However, the perception of meaning is influenced by the mental frame of the receiver at the time the message is received. Emotions which dominate our mood at the time, e.g., anger, anxiety, fear, happiness, etc., will affect our interpretation of the message. The phrases ‘viewing with coloured glasses’ or‘seeing with jaundiced eyes’ explain vividly how our inner feelings may vitiate our perception of the message or the situation. Post experience of the receiver in such situations would also lead to the same effect. The same thing may happen when different individuals interpret the same event or situation. Let us consider the case of a supervisor watching a group of employees resting and To the supervisor, who believes that employees are basically lazy, the situation communicates that Aspects gossiping on the lawns. How will this situation be perceived? they are playing truant with their work, and, therefore, should be given more work to do and disciplined.
To the supervisor who believes that his/her workers are self-motivated and sincere, the situation communicates that they are re-charging their batteries through recreation and enjoyment.You will, therefore, see that a particular kind of situation, event, happening or words and symbols are capable of being interpreted differently by different people depending on their psychological states. A receiver who is suspicious or hostile, either as a consequence of his/her feeling of insecurity or because of his/her past experience with the sender of the communication, is more likely to start ‘reading between the lines’ and ascribe a distorted meaning to the message.o the receiver’s mind a communication gets tied up with the personality of the source.
One common phenomenon with all communications is the effect of filtering.This effect is produced when the communication passes through a large number of persons. Each individual through whom the information is passed interprets facts differently, judges from her/his own point of view what is important or relevant, and passes it on with her/his own interpretations, with the result that the original communication gets altered in the process. The process of filtering involves a biased choice of what is communicated, on the part of either the sender or the receiver. Thus filtering refers to the process of ‘selective telling’ or ‘selective listening’. For example, a subordinate may tell the boss what s/he (the boss) wants to hear. Similarly, though several factors affecting productivity in the organisation may have been identified by the staff,yet the manager may hear and respond only to those factors that fit in the process of communication leading to a distortion in communication.
Organisations are particularly prone to the filtering effect. In large organisations, filtering takes place at multiple levels. In order to save the time of the busy executive and to save him/her from information overload, it is common in organisations for subordinates to prepare notes or abstracts of the communication before passing it on to the superior. The higher an information has to travel, the higher is the degree of abstraction, with the possibility that significant pieces of information may be entirely missed or their significance diluted or distorted. The larger the number of filtering points in an organisation, the greater are the chances of distortion.
Organisational Barriers
Organisations provide a formal framework through which communication is designed to flow. The structuring of the flow itself tends to act as a barrier against free flow of communication between persons and levels in the organisation. Rules may prescribe how communications are to move from one level to another in upward or downward directions. Not only is there a possibility of delay in the communication reaching its destination, but also there is every possibility of communication getting distorted through the process of filtering as described earlier. It has been found that when information is channelled through different levels of the organisation, it alters as people interpreted facts differently. In an organisational setting, this can be a very big problem since senior level executives have to depend on the information and interpretations of their subordinates. A critical information that has lost its criticality because of the actions of the intervening levels may jeopardize the position of the manager as well as the organisation itself.
The superior-subordinate relationship itself develops a gap between the two. People are more comfortable in communicating with persons of equal status as their own. Communication with persons of higher or lower status is likely to be formal and reticent rather than informal and free. You may have seen that the parking space, bathrooms, refreshment rooms, cabins with stylized furniture, carpets, for the CEO are earmarked. Such symbols accentuate the gap between different hierarchical levels and tend to widen the communication gap.
Perhaps, you may have read that among the several characteristics of Japanese style of management is the removal of status symbols. For example, under the Japanese system there are no separate cabins for managers; the uniforms for workers and managers are the same; they eat the same food in the same cafeteria. All these are intended to reduce the gap between the workers and the managers and bring about a better understanding of the problems of the organisation which is the chief objective of organisational communication. In India, Infosys has some of these practices.
The failure in communication is caused by barriers between the sender and the receiver. To make communication effective, it must be ensured that these barriers areremoved/overcome. Now-a-days media has become very powerful only because it has devised ways to reach the target audience. The barriers either prevent the communication from reaching the receiver or distort it in such a manner that it ends up either as non-communication or as miscommunication. Since a manager has to use communication as a means of getting work done through his/her subordinates, s/he must ensure that the barriers are minimized.The barriers that interfere with the understanding of the communication are of three kinds: semantic, psychological and organisational. We now discuss these one by one.
Semantic Barriers
Most difficulties in communication arise because the same word or symbol signifies different things to different individuals. You may recall how Shiny Abraham was disqualified and lost her gold medal, despite coming first by a very wide margin in the 800 m race, at the Asian Games at Seoul (1986). She had crossed the track at the place where she should not have done. According to her, she mistook the symbol, i.e., the colour of the flag. In our country, the red flag indicates danger but in South Korea, white flag is used for the same purpose. Words, action or a feeling, can have several meanings. For example, abstract words like merit, effectiveness or responsibility, can be interpreted differently by different persons. Difficulty in understanding may arise even in the case of words which have different contextual meanings in different regions/countries. To give you an example, a problem arose in interpreting the meaning of the word ‘steps’. In a training programme of health workers relating to family health in Jamaica, this question was asked: “What are some of the steps that a mother should take to make sure that her baby keeps healthy?” There was no response to this question because the trainees were accustomed to only one meaning of the word ‘steps’ based on their experience; they just could not make any sense of the question.Communication Semantic difficulty also arises because of unfamiliarity with words, for example, a word of Skills and a foreign language or a technical word.
Motivation
An effective communication is one which uses words appropriate to the environment and mental framework of the receiver. This ensures that communication is grasped properly and implemented effectively. Read the following story to understand this point:A proposal for raising the salaries of the faculty members of an agricultural college was under discussion. The farmers’ block was totally against giving the raise to the college teachers – they could not see why they should pay those college teachers $5000 a year just for talking 12 to 15 hours a week. Faculty representatives made no headway in their negotiations until one of them who had some farming experience, got an inspiration.
“Gentlemen”, he told the members of the administrative body, “a college teacher is like a little bull. It is not the amount of time he spends. It is the importance of what he does!”The faculty members got the raise.Semantic barrier can also be created if body language is inconsistent with the verbal communication. A manager who praises the honesty and sincerity of his/her subordinate in a sarcastic tone creates doubts in the minds of the subordinate as to the course of action s/he should adopt in a given situation in future. The same kind of barrier is created by a divergence between the verbal language and the action language of the superiors. When action and language are used jointly, the actions often have more powerful influence on other’s actions than words. A management may, for example, profess its belief in being guided solely by the merit of employees while making promotions. But if employees observe that, in actual practice, promotions are made on considerations other than merit, the management’s professed policy is bound to be affected by a semantic barrier.
Psychological Barriers
Psychological barriers are the prime barriers in inter-personal communication. The meaning that is ascribed to a message depends upon the emotional or psychological status of both the parties concerned. As such, the psychological barriers may be set up either by the receiver or the sender of the message.You have already seen that the effectiveness of any communication depends upon the perception of the right meaning of the message by the receiver.However, the perception of meaning is influenced by the mental frame of the receiver at the time the message is received. Emotions which dominate our mood at the time, e.g., anger, anxiety, fear, happiness, etc., will affect our interpretation of the message. The phrases ‘viewing with coloured glasses’ or‘seeing with jaundiced eyes’ explain vividly how our inner feelings may vitiate our perception of the message or the situation. Post experience of the receiver in such situations would also lead to the same effect. The same thing may happen when different individuals interpret the same event or situation. Let us consider the case of a supervisor watching a group of employees resting and To the supervisor, who believes that employees are basically lazy, the situation communicates that Aspects gossiping on the lawns. How will this situation be perceived? they are playing truant with their work, and, therefore, should be given more work to do and disciplined.
To the supervisor who believes that his/her workers are self-motivated and sincere, the situation communicates that they are re-charging their batteries through recreation and enjoyment.You will, therefore, see that a particular kind of situation, event, happening or words and symbols are capable of being interpreted differently by different people depending on their psychological states. A receiver who is suspicious or hostile, either as a consequence of his/her feeling of insecurity or because of his/her past experience with the sender of the communication, is more likely to start ‘reading between the lines’ and ascribe a distorted meaning to the message.o the receiver’s mind a communication gets tied up with the personality of the source.
One common phenomenon with all communications is the effect of filtering.This effect is produced when the communication passes through a large number of persons. Each individual through whom the information is passed interprets facts differently, judges from her/his own point of view what is important or relevant, and passes it on with her/his own interpretations, with the result that the original communication gets altered in the process. The process of filtering involves a biased choice of what is communicated, on the part of either the sender or the receiver. Thus filtering refers to the process of ‘selective telling’ or ‘selective listening’. For example, a subordinate may tell the boss what s/he (the boss) wants to hear. Similarly, though several factors affecting productivity in the organisation may have been identified by the staff,yet the manager may hear and respond only to those factors that fit in the process of communication leading to a distortion in communication.
Organisations are particularly prone to the filtering effect. In large organisations, filtering takes place at multiple levels. In order to save the time of the busy executive and to save him/her from information overload, it is common in organisations for subordinates to prepare notes or abstracts of the communication before passing it on to the superior. The higher an information has to travel, the higher is the degree of abstraction, with the possibility that significant pieces of information may be entirely missed or their significance diluted or distorted. The larger the number of filtering points in an organisation, the greater are the chances of distortion.
Organisational Barriers
Organisations provide a formal framework through which communication is designed to flow. The structuring of the flow itself tends to act as a barrier against free flow of communication between persons and levels in the organisation. Rules may prescribe how communications are to move from one level to another in upward or downward directions. Not only is there a possibility of delay in the communication reaching its destination, but also there is every possibility of communication getting distorted through the process of filtering as described earlier. It has been found that when information is channelled through different levels of the organisation, it alters as people interpreted facts differently. In an organisational setting, this can be a very big problem since senior level executives have to depend on the information and interpretations of their subordinates. A critical information that has lost its criticality because of the actions of the intervening levels may jeopardize the position of the manager as well as the organisation itself.
The superior-subordinate relationship itself develops a gap between the two. People are more comfortable in communicating with persons of equal status as their own. Communication with persons of higher or lower status is likely to be formal and reticent rather than informal and free. You may have seen that the parking space, bathrooms, refreshment rooms, cabins with stylized furniture, carpets, for the CEO are earmarked. Such symbols accentuate the gap between different hierarchical levels and tend to widen the communication gap.
Perhaps, you may have read that among the several characteristics of Japanese style of management is the removal of status symbols. For example, under the Japanese system there are no separate cabins for managers; the uniforms for workers and managers are the same; they eat the same food in the same cafeteria. All these are intended to reduce the gap between the workers and the managers and bring about a better understanding of the problems of the organisation which is the chief objective of organisational communication. In India, Infosys has some of these practices.
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