Communication Challenges

Effective communications are vital for success in today's business. Managers need to communicate with those they deal with—their customers, employees, vendors, and the public—in order to give directions, share ideas, motivate and elicit or disseminate needed information. Communicating takes up the majority of the time for managers and business people, and can be in the form of writing, talking, listening, or using the internet.

Communication can be defined as a process in which the sender is transferring meaning to the receiver. This involves coding of the message by the sender and decoding it by the receiver. A medium is involved in the conveyance of the message and can be words, behavior, or material artifacts. Naturally, in the process of communications breakdowns may occur and this is termed as noise. The barriers to effective communication include: semantics, where different words can have different meanings, such as fix and hot; jargon, when technical terms commonly used by various professions, such as military or engineers, are employed; acronyms and abbreviations mainly used by different groups such as the military; perception when one interprets things differently and distortion [Page 300]results; and emotion where one is unable to receive what is conveyed due to the pressures of the mental state.

When communication takes place across cultures, even greater challenges arise. As culture dictates how people view the world, it follows that culture also determines how people encode messages, the meaning they ascribe to the message, and how, when and why the message is transmitted, and finally how it is decoded and interpreted. Culture may be the actual foundation of communication. Hence cross-cultural variables directly affect the communication process and can pose a multitude of challenges. Here are some of the cultural variables that can affect the communication process:

There is a close relationship between language and culture. Language reflects and affects culture directly and indirectly. It is a reflection of the values of the particular community. Language is essentially meaning attached to words in a totally arbitrary way. The vocabulary of a language depicts what is considered important in that culture. There are seven words for bamboo in South India but only one for ice and there is no word for snow. In America there are several words pertaining to the self but only one in Japanese indicating the individualistic and collectivistic approaches of the two cultures.

Poor or limited knowledge of a language is a frequent cause of miscommunication and misinterpretation. When Pepsi Cola's slogan “Come Alive with Pepsi” was introduced in Germany, it was discovered that the literal German translation of “come alive” is “come out of the grave.”

A sign in a Romanian hotel informing the English-speaking guests that the elevator was not working read “The lift is being fixed. For the next few days we regret that you will be unbearable.” One way of overcoming this is to use back translation, where one person does the translation and another translates the translated version back ot the original language. Knowing a language well does not guarantee communication success. “Yes” when used by Asians usually means that they have heard you and understand what you are saying, while in the West it would be taken as agreement to your viewpoint or proposal.

...