The Four Common Communication Barriers In The Workplace

In today’s workplace, there is a constant fight for diversity that has caused some organizations to hire or create entirely new positions that ensure the rights of an individual is met. To truly capture the importance of how diversity works, we must first understand what diversity is. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines diversity as, “the condition of having or being composed of differing elements: variety; especially: the inclusion of different types of people (as people of different races or cultures) in a group or organization.” (Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, 2017). The push for diversity in the workplace forces organizations to face a large number of problems including communication barriers, cultural resistance, and discrimination

According to Chendeka in “4 Common Communication Barriers in the Workplace,” there are language barriers between employees that come from the same country or even the same city, therefore tend to communicate using different words with the same meaning (Chendeka, 2015). This proves to be an overwhelming problem within the workplace especially if the employees are not accepting of everyone’s language. In the article, “Barriers to Workplace Communication” Nordmeyer states that an employee attending an all hands meeting may interpret a message from their supervisor incorrectly due to a lack of proper communication (Nordmeyer, 2017). Language is not the only communication barrier that organizations have to deal with. There are certain perceptual barriers that link directly to the issues of effective communication. According to Nordmeyer, employees perceive things in certain ways, making it difficult to understand new meanings. (Nordmeyer, 2017). Organizations need to understand all the possible communication barriers that can occur in the workplace and allow their managers to hire the most effective

However, the more diverse a group of employees becomes the more likely they will be subjected to different forms of discrimination. In the essay, “Introduction to a Special Issue on Inequality in the Workplace,” Tolbert and Castilla write that organizations that are highly diverse tend to deal with more anger management issues due to increased discrimination than other organizations (Tolbert and Castilla, 2017). When an organization decides to become more diverse it places itself at higher risk to lose assets trying to appeal to each