Marisa Figueroa
Professor Morris-Henry
Business Communication
7/23/2015

Barriers in Business Communication
Effective communication is essential to the success of any business organization.
Since the world is becoming a global village it is of utmost importance to effectively communicate within and outside of an organization. However, due to large organizational sizes and tall organizational structures it becomes difficult to get any message across. This creates boundaries in the organization, internally in terms of various departments and externally in terms of customers.
A businesses objective is to survive, grow and increase the quality of their services while providing a good quality service and maintaining a good quality work force. None of these things are possible if the communications between employees within the organization or with the public are poor. If there is no open communication between the management, employees and outside vendors, one wouldn't know what the other was doing, so the revenue of the organization is in jeopardy. A possible barrier to communication could be a lack of explanation or understanding. If instructions are not fully understood it is likely that important message will be missed. Another possible barrier could be the equipment breaking down causing messages to be missed. If the company had barriers to communication, the objectives

needed in order to survive wouldn't be met. Therefore they wouldn't have effective communication internally and externally.
To overcome this dilemma, we will emphasize on the importance of making the point stick rather than just getting the message across and explain how to go about it.
Urban legends have been stuck in peoples' minds and have persisted over decades, spanning over cultural boundaries. For instance, the story of the dead girl who appears on a dark eerie roadside is known almost world over, yet in different situations. In the
American version, the man who finds the girl is in a car. In the European version, the car is replaced by a carriage and whereas in the Chinese version, the mode of transport is believed to be a horse. This is an example of that shows that urban legends succeed even though they lack many advantages that organizational messages have. They do not have support from top management. They do not have advertising budgets, or public relation assistants. They often arouse negative feelings of fear and disgust due to which people do not often like them. Yet, they still spread.
Communication is a two way process between the senders and the receivers. It is a way of passing on information to an employee and employee responding by sending a message back to the employer. Communication can be split up into two groups, internal and external communication. Internal communication takes place within the company, for example Administration Director talking to the Managing
Director. However, external communication takes place between someone within the company and someone outside the company. Communication can be split up into, two different channels of communication: vertical and horizontal communication.
Vertical communication takes place up and down the hierarchy, for example

Administration Director talking to the Managing Director. Whereas, horizontal communication takes place when workers on the same level of the hierarchy to communicate formally. For example, the Administration Director is talking to the
Finance Director.
Vertical communication is upwards and downwards, downwards communication it the organization command chain carrying messages from the superior to the subordinate. Upward communication is the response of the message information onto the managers.
Horizontal communication takes place among employees at the same level within the organization. The advantages to this are that conflicts can be solved without over burdening communication channels. Horizontal communication may also take place to avoid inefficiencies of vertical