Barriers to Effective Communication
There are a wide number of sources of noise or interference that can enter into the communication process. This can occur and there is a need to understand the sources of error. In a work setting, it is even more common since interactions involve people who not only don't have years of experience with each other, but communication is complicated by the complex and often conflictual relationships that exist at work. In a work setting, the following suggests a number of sources of noise:
[I do feel that the same would apply within any on-line community setting, or indeed, any set of personal interactions]
* Language: The choice of words or language in which a sender encodes a message will influence the quality of communication. Because language is a symbolic representation of a phenomenon, room for interpreation and distortion of the meaning exists. Note that the same words will be interpreted different by each different person. Meaning has to be given to words and many factors affect how an individual will attribute meaning to particular words. It is important to note that no two people will attribute the exact same meaning to the same words.
* defensiveness, distorted perceptions, guilt, project, transference, distortions from the past
* misreading of body language, tone and other non-verbal forms of communication
* noisy transmission (unreliable messages, inconsistency)
* receiver distortion: selective hearing, ignoring non-verbal cues
* power struggles
* self-fulfilling assumptions
* language-different levels of meaning
* assumptions-eg. assuming others see situation same as you, has same feelings as you
* distrusted source, erroneous translation, value judgment, state of mind of two people
* Perceptual Biases: People attend to stimuli in the environment in very different ways. We each have shortcuts that we use to organize data. Invariably, these shortcuts introduce some biases into communication.
Some of these shortcuts include stereotyping, projection, and self-fulfilling prophecies.
Stereotyping is one of the most common. This is when we assume that the other person has certain characteristics based on the group to which they belong without validating that they in fact have these characteristics.
* Interpersonal Relationships: How we perceive communication is affected by the past experience with the individual. Percpetion is also affected by the organizational relationship two people have. For example, communication from a superior may be perceived differently than that from a subordinate or peer
* Cultural Differences: Effective communication requires deciphering the basic values, motives, aspirations, and assumptions that operate across geographical lines. Given some dramatic differences across cultures in approaches to such areas as time, space, and privacy, the opportunities for mis-communication while we are in cross-cultural situations are plentiful.
Just some thoughts for open discussion regarding potential barriers to communication.
Leah x
