Business Communication

1. Wrong Choice of Medium
Each communication must be transmitted through an appropriate medium. An unsuitable medium
is one of the biggest barriers to communication.
Examples: When communication takes place in big organisation and departments or division are
far from each other. If any manager wants to communicate with others for confidential matter than
they opt written communication as compared to other medium of communication. So, it is required
that medium should be accurate and if wrong or unsuitable medium is selected than it leads to the
biggest barrier to communication.
2. Physical Barriers
•
Noise—In factory, oral communication is rendered difficult by the loud noise of machines.
•
Electronic noise interferes in communication by telephone or loud speaker system.
•
The word noise is also used to refer to all kind of physical interference like illegible hand
writing, bad photo-copies etc.
•
Time and distance.
—
Congestion in telephone and network facilities.
—
People working in different shifts.
—
Faulty seating arrangement in a hall.
3. Semantic Barriers
•
Interpretation of words
A person interprets same word in a different meaning and this will cause barrier between
the communications. Murphy and Peck in their book ‘Effective Business Communication’
mentioned, the little word ‘run’ has
71 meanings as a verb
35 as noun
4 more as an adjective.

---

■ ■ ■
■ ■ ■
■ ■ ■
■ ■ ■
■ ■ ■
Communication and Organization Structure / 15
•
Bypassed instructions
Bypassing is said to have occurred if the sender and the receiver of the message attribute
different meanings to the same word or use different words for the same meaning.
“Take it to be our stockroom and burn it”
In official language burn it means to make more copies of the same document.
•
Denotation & Connotations
Words have two types of meanings denotative and connotative.
Denotative—The literal meaning of a word is called its denotative meaning.
It must inform and names objects without indicating any positive or negative.
Connotative—It allows qualitative judgments and personal reactions.
Like—Honest, cheap, sincere etc.
Ex:—“He gave us cheap material”.
“At this shop, they sell things cheap”.
First one is favourable connotation and second is unfavourable.
To avoid this problem (By passed instruction and connotative meaning of words) the
followings can be used:
❖
Prefer words which are familiar to the receiver.
❖
If words are unfamiliar to the receiver, we should make meanings clear the very first time
we use it.
❖
We should choose words with positive rather than negative connotation.