Page 272 - DMGT402_MANAGEMENT_PRACTICES_AND_ORGANIZATIONAL_BEHAVIOUR

Unit 13: Communication and Leadership

is increasingly made up of people who differ in race, gender, age, culture, family structure, Notes
religion, and family background. Such cultural diversity affects how business messages
are conceived, planned, sent, received, and interpreted in the workplace.
4. Understanding Culture: Every country or region within a country has a unique common
heritage, joint experience, or shared learning. This shared background produces the culture
of a region, country, or society. For our purposes, culture may be defined as the complex
system of values, traits, morals, and customs shared by a society. Culture teaches people
how to behave, and it conditions their reactions. Intercultural communications helps in
understanding various cultures.

Educational Communication

This type of communication relates to the field of education. It involves any type of communication
flows, levels, systems that lead to acquisition and imparting of learning.

Example: A teacher, teaching in a class or a student giving a presentation in a class etc.

Task Analyse the type of communication that you follow or have followed as a
student while communicating with your friends, seniors and principal. Is
there any difference?

13.3 Barriers to Effective Communication

Barriers to communication are factors that block or significantly distort successful communication.
Effective managerial communication skills helps overcome some, but not all, barriers to
communication in organisations. The more prominent barriers to effective communication
which every manager should be aware of is given below:

Filtering: Filtering refers to a situation where sender manipulating information so it will be
seen more favourably by the receiver. The major determinant of filtering is the number of levels
in an organisation’s structure. The more vertical levels in the organisation’s hierarchy, the more
will be the opportunities for filtering. Sometimes the information is filtered by the sender
himself. If the sender is hiding or camouflaging some meaning and disclosing information in
such a fashion as to make it more appealing to the receiver, then he is “filtering” the message
deliberately. A manager in the process of altering communication in his favour is attempting to
filter the information.
Selective Perception: Selective perception means seeing what one wants to see. The receiver, in
the communication process, generally resorts to selective perception, i.e., he selectively perceives
the message based on the organisational requirements, the needs and characteristics, background
of the employees, etc. Perceptual distortion is one of the distressing barriers to the effective
communication. People interpret what they see and call it a reality. In our regular activities, we
tend to see those things that please us and to reject or ignore unpleasant things. Selective
perception allows us to keep out dissonance (the existence of conflicting elements in our
perceptual set) at a tolerable level. If we encounter something that does not fit our current image
of reality, we structure the situation to minimize our dissonance. Thus, we manage to overlook
many stimuli from the environment that do not fit into our current perception of the world. This
process has significant implications for managerial activities.

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