The Model Of Communication Process

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Communication refers to the process by which information is transmitted and understood between two or more people. (McShane & Von Glinow, 2010) Communication is important to organization because people work independently through communication with each other. It helps employee to clarify their expectations and coordinates work in order to achieve organizational objectives more effectively and efficiently. For instance, communication enable an employee receive information from other co-workers to manage their work environment, job and the procedures to handle their task. Perfect communication, if there were such a thing, would exist when a thought or an idea was transmitted so that the mental picture perceived by the receiver was exactly the same as the envisioned by the sender.

Communication consists of 4 major functions which are control, motivation, emotional expression and information. Communication can control the organization member behavior. Employees are required to first communicate with the immediate boss to do their job which undertake with the company policies. In other way, employee also can informally communicate among each other to coordinate their task within their job scope.

The organization can motivate by clarifying the work done and performance are whether good or bad. We will review this in goal setting and reinforcement. By forming specific goals, feedback toward the goals and reinforcement can stimulate the motivation to the organization.

In organization, employees have social-interaction in a work group. They can release their emotional expression of feelings and fulfillment of social needs via communication. For example, employee shows their frustration and satisfaction in the working place within their work group.

Communication takes role in facilitating decision making of the related roles or personnel. It provides the information that employee needed in order to identify and evaluate those transmitted data to make the decision.

The model of communication process

A model of communication process is showing that how the communication process between the sender and receiver. The sender forms a message and encodes it into words, gesture, posture, voice and other various types of symbols and signs. Then the following encoded message is transmitted through the channels which are verbal or non verbal forms to the desire receiver. The receiver senses the transmitted message and decodes it into the meaning or information that sender intended to mean. Afterward, to proof that the receiver understand the meaning message transmitted by the sender, they will seek for the feedback from receiver. The receiver may respond in a formal acknowledgement directly or does certain reaction subsequently. The feedback is repeated the communication process to encode, transmit and decode from the receiver to the sender of the original message. However, the message is obstructed by the noise in communicating between sender and receiver. The noise is referring to the psychological, social and structural barrier which are distorting and obscuring the intended message from the sender to the sender. If the communication process is broken, the sender and receiver would not have the identical understanding of the message.

To increase the effectiveness of the communication, the ability of sender and receiver in encoding and decoding information are equally important. There are 4 identified factors that influence the accuracy of the encoding and decoding process. First factor is different ability and motivation to communicate through the communication channel. Some people have better confident to communicate through face-to-face conversation while some people are shy in conversation and yet they good in communicating in via text message technologies. Hence, it means that if the selected communication channel must be preferred by both parties of the sender and receiver in order to transmit the encoded and decoded message to each other accurately. For example, coca-cola company use multi channels of communication such as intranet e-mail, employee portal, video conferencing or face-to-face meeting and many other ways accordingly to deliver the message within the organization.

The second factor that influence the effectiveness of encode-decode process is the communication participants have the similar level of "codebooks" in terms of symbols, languages, gesture, idioms and other tools to deliver the message. With the similarity level of the "codebook", the communication participants can get the same meaning of the message more accurately. Besides that, the communication can be more efficient because it is also reduce the redundancy of the communication to confirm the message whether is get the same meaning among communication participants. For example, not only coca-cola company, most of the operational or manufacturing department, those operators within a group has their specific gesture instead of talking to communicate with each other.

The third factor that influence the effectiveness of encode-decode process is the participants in communication possess the similar mental models about the topic’s context. Mental models are the visualized or relational images in our mind that represent the external world. When the sender and receiver shared the mental models, they have the same understanding to the external environment relating to the information, so lesser of the clarification to the message content. Compare with "codebooks", the mental models are knowledge structures of the communication topic setting while the "codebooks" is symbolic in conveying message. For example, coca-cola company has clearly define and delivered their organization missions and visions to all employees. So employee is sharing the same mental models in terms missions and visions to comply those company guidelines to perform their job.

The fourth factor that influence the effectiveness of encode-decode process is the sender experience in conveying the message. When a person get used to a certain topics, they have developed more proficient skill to describe the subject. This is similar to training and practices that provide to employee, the employee is able to perform better in a certain tasks because of they have practicing the similar repetitive problem, they know how to use the even better method to solve the problems. For example, an experienced leader in operational level, he or she has the experience in handling those repetitive problems. Those problems are structured and familiar and can be referring to the coca-cola company rules and policies to solve it.