5101
ORGANISATION BEHAVIOUR
Case study: Bridging The Two Worlds - The Organizational Dilemma
What are the barriers to effective communications in Aluminium Elements Corp and how were they addressed? What would you do differently?
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1.0 INTRODUCTION
Communication refers to the process in which information is transmitted and understood between two or more people. The word "understood" is emphasized because the transmitting of the sender's meaning to other people is the essence of good communication. In the model of communication, there are various channels and barriers (noise) that can become the factors of communication effectiveness.
1.1 Introduction to communication
Figure 1 Communication
As we can see, George was actually surprised when he found out that John was upset when he received the memo following his accomplishment. The latter misunderstood the intention because the medium used in this communication was usually used to deliver ‘bad news’.
William also found that shop floor employees were not accustomed to talking with the management and office staffs. This was because, any verbal communication that occurred between them would be one-way and consisting of orders and demand by the management.
Furthermore, shop floor employees have not been invited to join the daily production meeting unless there was a specific issue that necessitates their attendance. This is also a kind of one way communication because the management did not “hear” the real issues from the production. In fact, the production meeting was held without the production members.
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2.3 Information overload
Each people have certain level of information process capacity which is the amount of information they can process in a fixed unit of time. When the information a receiver received is more that his process capacity can hold, he may misinterpret the message from the sender.
For example in the case study, William found that John found George unpleasant because George always wrote long and complex memos to shop floor employees. John could not understand the memo