Common Barriers To Effective Communication In An Organization

In a company or business, there would always be a potential barriers to communicate with each other. Here are three examples of potential barriers to effective communication:

1) Language barriers

Language barriers may occur in the office, in the company or the business. Language is obviously needed in any kind of form of communication, but communication can become harder to understand due to the people having different languages - Technology that is used in the message will act as a barrier, this is if the receiver does not understand the message sent by the sender. Fail to understand each other is known as language barrier. For example; a message that has a lot of abbreviations and specialist jargon- the receiver may not understand or is familiar by the term used in the message. Causes of the language barrier is:

• Other countries accents
• Using Jargons or Slangs
• Spelling
• Grammar
• The person is not clear of what he/she just said (Not a Clear speech).

2) Psychological barriers

The message can come out wrongly, this is because the state of mind(the psychological state) will heavly influence on how the message is received, send and perceived. In effective communication, it needs good and functioning senses in both of the receiver and the sender- without a proper functioning senses in both parties, the message that is given or passed, or received will come off different as it was given or it has a different meaning compare to the original message. For example; the person that is about to send the message is angry and furious, this is an example of a psychological barrier to communication. When someone is angry, everything will come out of his or her mouth, thus making them regret later on when they are cooled down. This could misinterpret on what other people are saying. Deafness or hearing issues, hearing loss. A receiver that has this will not be able to receive any audio messages, the person that has this problem also wouldn’t be able to talk to people easily, they would have a hard time doing that. This goes the same to the sender, they won’t be able to get the feedback from the receiver. Communication in this is limited. Memory is one of the examples of potential barriers to effective communication, the human memory is very limited, the brain would not be able to remember every single detail of the information, it will only store that is needed in the near future, the memory is not permanent in the brain

This will make it harder to pass true information to the sender or receiver, forgetting about the information could lead to a bad communication.

3) Cultural barriers

Having cultural barriers is common in the workplace. Culture is about the arts, the signs, symbols, the ideas and traditions, the nationality, religion and ethnicity. This culture is passed down from one generation to another generation Examples of cultural barriers are: Ethnocentrism- meaning that there are groups, they divide the culture into two which is, “us” and “them “. Them as In their culture that is different from us.

This will affect a lot in understanding the messages, the person will only be nice if the other person is their culture. Beliefs and Behaviour could cause different thinking, communication, body language and manners- this could lead to a miscommunication, an example of this is some cultures believe that having eye contact is essential whereas other cultures might take eye contact as an offensive way or rude to the elderly. Good communication will only happen to them if both are willing to accept each other’s culture and differences. Stereotypes happens a lot in this, some people in a culture would believe that this specific culture is more smarter or more violent and is negative. This means they are overgeneralizing the people that belong to that culture and they have the same mentality or behaviours to that culture. They make stereotypical assumptions of the cultural background.