Barriers to Effective Communication

A communication barrier is everything that interferes with effective agreement between the sender and the recipient of the message. May result both from the mistakes made by one or other party in communication.

·         Disability- the main barrier to effective communication is disability. If someone is deaf, visually impaired of mute we might have serious problems to communicate with him.

·         Background noise- obstacles that appear in our immediate vicinity we can include the external barriers. These can be for example, loud music, loud conversation next to us (for example in open plan offices) or street buzz. Such barriers are fairly easy to remove would support a change of conversation or music off.

·         Cultural differences- lack of knowing the culture, customs, traditions and even the language of our partner in communication affects the process of communication.

·         Lack of decentring skills - most people can not empathize with the speaker's situation. For the communication to be effective it is necessary to adopt the perspective of the speaker. Sometimes it makes us bad listeners.

·         Stereotypes- this barrier arises due to the fact that we evaluate our partners in communication because of their status. More attention and respect we show to people of high status than those with low. We are inclined to agree with their views to be polite to them. Conversely, we behave in relation to the interlocutor, which is characterized by low social status.

·         Selectivity of attention - the distortion is the result of not focusing on the whole expression of our interlocutor only a single fact. The listener does not see all the topics covered by the sender.

Barriers that are the result of our emotions, problems with trust, or interference in decoding verbal and nonverbal messages:

·         Judging- is the result of imposing our own opinions to the other people and also proposing effective solutions (that would be good for other people), not including the problems of the person concerned. Person that creates this type of disruption of communication uses in conversation statements such us: criticizing, insulting, rules, praised in order to later manipulate or evaluate.

·         Language barrier- we are not able to communicate with the person who speaks in another language which is unknown to us. What is more we can have difficulties in communication with someone because of: the meddling of speech phrases in foreign languages, the use of codes or ciphers prearranged and known only to a selected person in the group, using profanity not accepted by us.

·         Deciding for others- this barrier is a result of trying to decide in certain situations for other people. This causes the rise in our interlocutor submission. The result of such actions is limited by the interlocutor of our openness and honesty of expression. Creating this barrier is usually through: commanded, forbidding, threatening, moralizing, and throwing questions.