Potential barriers to communication
Good and effective communication not only involves the transfer of information from the source to the receiver. It is an art that requires listening, reading, comprehending, and processing and transferring of information. A considerable amount of effort goes into communication to make it active and successful; some of them include cues like tone, body language, gestures, and spoken language. Despite many individuals, especially organization leaders have mastered the art of effective communication, there exist barriers to effective communication that affect the effectiveness of their conversation. Barriers have a negative implication to message being shared; they are factors that can distort a message to the extent of causing misunderstanding and confusion. Among the potential communication barriers include;
Language Barriers Language and linguistic abilities vary among individuals and have always acted as a communication barrier. The language barrier not only exists among individuals with different languages but is also realized among individuals using the same words through terminologies and communication vocabularies. For example, a message from a Chinese communicating in Chinese to an American who only understands English will not be understood by the American, and both the listener and the speaker will not agree due to communication barriers. In the same way, when a medical provider communicates to a teenager using the English language that comprises of medical terminologies, abbreviations, and jargon, the teenager will not understand the concept despite having been communicated in a familiar language. The two are examples of the way language barriers have an impact on the way communication is carried out.
Psychological Barriers have also been noted to affect communication. Receivers physical state is a factor that will influence the way the message being communicated will be received. For instance, if an individual is stressed, worried, or sick, the chances are that the respective individuals are mostly preoccupied by individual concerns and pays less attention to messages being communicated to them. Anger has been a negative influential factor of effective communication, when individuals are angry, they easily utter out words that they later regrets. As such, stable psychological state is an important factor in bringing about positive communication especially in organizations when message is being shared from the top management down to the junior employees.
The last communication barrier is physical Barriers, they are the natural and environmental conditions that affect information sharing from the sender to the receiver. Some of the notable physical barriers to communication include noise created by individuals or machines around, design problems together with attention seekers like billboards and technological designs.