Aspects of Communication

Module 1. The Nature of Business Communication

Lecture 4. Aspects of Communication and Communication Barriers: ‘When the play turns out to be a comedy or a tragedy’

The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the character of individuals.’

Henry David Thoreau

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.’

Carl Jung

r Aspects of Communication

r Types of Communication Barriers

r People’s Roles in Building Communication Barriers

r Overcoming Barriers

r Recommended Reading

r Glossary of the Basic Terms

In the previous lectures we discussed the roles of the main participants and elements of the communication process, and now we are going to look at the communication as an integral process and consider the aspects of communication and how they influence the quality of communication.

Now it is the matter of common knowledge that communication failures cost dearly. And it is not only the question of the money paid for bad PR or advertising campaign. It is the question of spoiled company image which will take time to improve. All communicators often treat their messages too optimistically: they forget that their message is sure to be distorted on its way to the receiver. Initially problems in communication were mainly associated with technological problems (e.g. bad telephone line, slow transmission, etc.). Now it has become clear that the majority of communication barriers are rooted in the human being himself (Blundel 2000: 35). Our awareness of all the aspects of the communication process, weak and strong traits of any sender and the conscious application of various communication channels may help us overcome communication barriers we face. That is why this topic deserves a separate lecture.

According to R.Sheldon (1989:7), a barrier to communication is either some condition or state of the sender or receiver as persons, or something done by either of them which impedes or distorts the communication.

Spivak (2002:142-144) together with other social psychologists distinguishes between three aspects of communication: perceptive aspect, communicative aspect and interactive aspect.

Perception aspect is connected with perceiving the partner, with impression received from him/her and allows analysing the factors that influence perception, attitude to the partner irrespective of the subject of communication. Among those factors are the factors influencing the first impression, developing and influencing the impression from the long-term communication. This aspect helps analyse how the context, environment and self-presentation expression influence the impression and perception of the partner.

The first impression is aimed at discovering the principal qualities of the partner, such as ‘own-strange’, ‘useful – useless’, ‘good – bad’. They are needed for the communication process to develop. The way we perceive these qualities influences our behaviour and our expectations of the partner’s behaviour. Those qualities and further attitude to the partner are determined by such factors as superiority factor (clothes, manners, etc.), attractiveness factor, a factor of relation towards us. These factors often distort perception: having perceived the influence of one factor and having jumped to quick conclusions as to our attitude to the partner we tend to perceive the partner’s other personal traits through the prism of our quick conclusions. Our perception, hence, is very often based on stereotypes, prejudice and biased attitudes that reflect group or society opinion about the other groups’ system of qualities.

Stereotyping is classifying people by their belonging to a group, social or economic class, by their physical characteristics. This is when we assume that the other person has certain characteristics based on the group to which they belong without validating that they in fact have these characteristics. On this basis a simplified view about them is created and their behaviour is predicted on this insufficient basis. Stereotyping is generalisation that is helpful at the beginning of communication, yet it often hinders creating an objective view of a person.

Prejudice is a kind of stereotype (generalisation) judging people without knowing them and their motives. It often looks for proofs confirming your opinion in order to increase your status in the society concerning a group criticised.

Biased attitude is evaluative statement—either favourable or unfavourable— concerning objects, people, or events. They reflect how one feels about some­thing. Attitudes are not the same as values, but the two are interrelated. You can see this by looking at the three components of an attitude: cognition, affect, and behaviour.

The belief that "discrimination is wrong" is a value statement. Such an opinion is the cognitive component of an attitude. It sets the stage for the more critical part of an attitude—its affective component. Affect is the emo­tional or feeling segment of an attitude and is reflected in the statement "I don't like Jon because he discriminates against minorities." Finally, affect can lead to behav­ioural outcomes. The behavioural component of an attitude refers to an inten­tion to behave in a certain way toward someone or something. So, to continue our example, I might choose to avoid Jon because of my feeling about him. However, if I jumped to conclusion thinking that Jon discriminates against minorities basing on erroneous data, Jon may not deserve such attitude and will never understand my treating him like that.

To minimize the possibility of mistakes in social perception it is necessary to clarify perception and get rid of stereotypes, prejudices and biased attitudes that may easily distort communication unless the partners are ready to update them with the information received from the further contacts.

During long-term communication we can perceive a person basing on more significant and comprehensive information about it, analyzing his behaviour and reading non-verbal communication cues. We then are able to create a more complex model of this personality, and thus, make more reliable forecasts of his behaviour.

Communicative aspect of the communication process is connected with exchange of information, opinions, feelings, desires, states, etc. We aim at transmitting them to the partner and expect a certain response in the form of understanding, approval, or change of his opinion, mood, and behaviour. The success of this transmission depends on a number of factors that refer to our specific and unique personal traits and psychic processes.

In the previous lectures we mainly focused on the message as an element of the communication process and a source for communication breakdown. We spoke about the sender and receiver only in terms of how they may interpret (code - decode) the message. We left aside their psychological characteristics as they will be considered in the following chapters.

The third aspect of communication is interactive, connected with the parties’ interaction in the process of communication. The interaction process permeates communication from the beginning to the end, influences its dynamics and development. Actions chosen by the partners (verbal and non-verbal signals, positions taken, reactions) reflect their understanding of the situation and their view on what is the ‘correct’ behaviour in such situation. Similarly to two other aspects the interactive aspect analysis helps gather detailed information about the partner.

Within the interactive aspect of communication the situation may be assessed by means of ‘parties’ positions’, a psychological term which denotes the status positions of the partners relating to each other: higher – lower; the leader – the led; a persecutor – a victim, etc. As soon as the status and position of a communication partner are determined correctly, we can find out his/her communication purposes and strategy of behaviour, relatively accurately forecast his/her behaviour and take relevant measures in response; either tune to the partner, or try to change his/her position if it is unacceptable, or end the communication.

As you can see, being highly interconnected all three aspects of the communication process have their specific features. The communicative aspect deals with transmitting the message, which involves the quality of the information, choice of channel and means of communication, and other factors we discussed in lectures 2 and 3. Yet it depends significantly on the perception and interactive aspects, which cover the people’s psychology, social status and context of communication, which will be discussed in the following lectures.

The integrated character of the aspects of communication contributed to a number of communication barriers caused by their complex nature. Let us look at the scholars’ attempts to classify communication barriers.

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