Business Communication - Essay Example

Communication Barriers Communication is a key tool used in an organisation to coordinate the major functions of planning, organising, staffing, directing, and controlling. Constantly, information needs to flow from one hierarchy of an organisation to the other and the necessary feedback received by the initiator of the communication. Communication occurs after a mutual exchange of understanding originating from the receiver. Effective business communication helps in building goodwill of an organisation and enhancing a good public image.

This paper examines communication barriers in the context of a conversation between a supervisor Marge Scott and one of his subordinate staff Jerry Mac.First, Marge did not plan well for Jerry’s evaluation. Jerry is full of excitement about his evaluation, has thus prepared well, and planned his time well in a way that he arrives at the conference room five minutes earlier. As a good leader, Marge needed to do likewise and appear on time for Jerry’s evaluation, which would give both of them a chance to converse and come to an agreement before eleven o’clock.

Marge is using her lagging behind schedule, her hectic morning, and a meeting ahead with an important client as an excuse to sit and evaluate Jerry in a proper manner. Her lack of planning brings about the miscommunication between her and jerry. Jerry even quotes her as “late again” to show that it is a habit.A second barrier to communication between Jerry and Marge is their conflicting goals. As a supervisor to Jerry, Marge retorts that if he rates Jerry anything beyond average, he may relax.

She appreciates that Jerry is working hard, but she does not communicate this to him. Instead, she decides to give him this rating to make Jerry work harder and improve on his work. On the other hand, Jerry expectations are high and according to him, an above average or excellent is his rating. He needs an explanation as to why Marge rates her as average and refuses to sign the evaluation documents. Marge cannot explain her aim in rating Jerry in the average column and thus they fail to understand one another.

According to slide share website, “effective communication takes place when other can see situations as we do, think about the situation as we do, and understand the message as we do” (Slide share web). Failure to this, wrong assumptions fill up the intended message hindering communication.Thirdly, another barrier to communication is ones state of mind at the time of receiving and sending the message. This is because encoding and decoding of messages depends on one’s emotional state at a particular time.

Extreme emotions like anger, depression, and happiness can hinder communication. In this particular case, Marge is tired after a busy morning and wants to spend as little time as possible with Jerry so that she can go and prepare the meeting with a client. She becomes angry when she realised that Jerry will not take it lightly receiving an average in his evaluation and wants more time with the papers to read the review and discuss it with her. She has no time for that. Jerry gets angry too on realising that his supervisor has not noted his enormous efforts, the long hours he puts in his job and that the hockey department has recruited lately.

Jerry gets even more emotional after an accusation of a non-performance outside his duties. Emotional state of both Marge and Jerry hinder communication.Works CitedSlide Share, “Barriers to Communication” 2012, Web, 20 July 2012