Barriers to Communication
Communication barriers can arise from either sender, channel, receiver or from the surroundings.
(a) Lack of planning to communicate—good communication is not by chance. Clear thinking must precede talking or writing. Often people talk or write without clear thinking and without a clear purpose for their work.
(b) Unclarified assumptions—most messages have an underlying assumption. For a message to be clearly understood both the sender and the receiver must understand the underlying assumption.
(c) Semantic distortion (language)—where words are not clearly understood because they are ambiguous. Besides some words have several meanings and when used in a message they may mean different things to different people.
(d) Poor expression (language)—caused by poorly chosen words, omissions, lack of coherence, awkward sentence structure and unfamiliar jargon.
(e) Loss of transmission—as the message is passed around people insert their own words or they paraphrase the message and this distorts the original message.
(f) Poor retention—few people retain things for a long period. People forget too fast.
(g) Poor listening—human minds keep wandering and as a message is being passed people keep pondering their own things. Some use the opportunity to make impressions on others and such people give ideas and comments totally unrelated to the message.
(h) Hasty (premature) evaluation—people have a common tendency to judge, approve or disapprove what is being said rather than trying to understand the speaker.
(i) Distrust, threat and fear—in an organization plagued by fear and distrust communication is difficult as each message is viewed sceptically.
(j) Insufficient period for adjustment to change—the essence of communication is to effect change. Change usually disrupts the way people have been carrying on their work and usually people need enough time to adjust to change.
(k) Noise—noise or interruptions from without the communication e.g. giving instructions in a noisy environment, disease, weather etc.