Barriers to Effective Communication:

One of the biggest dangers in communication is to suppose in which communication has taken place. Most of us indeed make a great effort in formulating ideas, and searching 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 might logically ask: What causes failure of communication? How could we make communication more effectual to bring about a desired change?

The failure in communication is caused through barriers among the sender and the receiver. To make communication effectual, it must be ensured that these barriers are removed/overcome. Now-a-days media has become very powerful only since 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 in which it ends up either as non-communication or as miscommunication. Because a manager has to use communication as a means of getting work done by his/her subordinates, s/he must ensure which the barriers are minimized.

The barriers which interfere with the understanding of the communication are of three types: semantic, psychological and organisational. We now discuss these one by one.