Professional Business Communication - Reflective Essay

This essay discusses the importance of effective communication, barriers to communication, self-awareness, cross-cultural communication, and ethical decision making in organizations.

Running Head: Professional Business Communication
Professional Business Communication
Reflective Essay

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Essay
It is always said that Humans are far superior to Animals, and one of the strong reasons for it is that
humans are gifted with ability to communicate; hence they are in a position to better express their
feeling, emotions, state of being and so on. Communication is basically a 2 way process, in order to
have an effective communication the one who is communicating should communicate in the way
that the other person can clearly understand the purpose of communication. Conducting
communication effectively helps an individual to better express his views in front of the other
person, this helps in better understanding of the sent message. It can be also seen as an
interpersonal skill which is must to have in any individual (Darling & Beebe, 2007). Effective
communication has an important role to play in organizations, the way one conducts himself in front
of his peers, management and colleagues paves the road for his/her success in the organization.
Effective communication can be directly co-related with productivity in the organization and the
smoothness in the operation process. An individual who is able to communicate effectively can
extract the best out of his team and also support them effectively at times of crisis (Sisson, 2017)
There are different barrier to effective communication, these are the barriers which prevent an
atmosphere of effective communication, and thus organization should try to reduce the impact of
barriers to communication. The five prominent barriers to communication within a company are
language, cultural, diversity, gender differences, status differences and physical separation (Ghobadi
& Mathiassen, 2016). These barriers can seriously distort or prevent effective communication within
the organization. In the era of globalization when workforce diversity is at peak, the use of jargons
from different culture makes it really difficult to communicate effectively. Some people are good at
their jobs but find it extremely difficult to express their emotions while communicating with another
person. At the same time some people find certain topics as taboos which also hamper effective
communication. Lack of attention, varied interest, distractions or irrelevance to the receiver also
masks effective communication among individuals. People have different perceptions towards a
problem and viewpoint, which also causes conflict to arise between the individuals, thereby
hampering the state of effective communication (Haas & Cummings, 2015). Organization by and
large does their best to keep the barriers of communication outside the doors of the organization, as
it is a negation to the growth of effective communication. Barriers to communication adversely
impact the productivity of an employee which in turn affects the productivity of the entire
organization. Hence it can be said that barriers to communication mask the path of effective

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communication. With the increasing growth in workforce diversity such barriers are prone to arise in
the organization, but a great manager can damask such barriers by conducting himself effectively.
Self-awareness is the capacity for introspection and the ability to recognize oneself as an individual
who is separate from the environment and other individuals. It is certainly not a state of
consciousness, but is more concerned with having knowledge about one’s character and feeling.
Self-awareness is having a clear perception of one’s personality which includes strength, weakness,
thoughts, motivation and emotion(Yazdanparast & Spears, 2018) Being self-aware a person exactly
knows what his weakness are and thus he can put a conscious effort to work on the weakness. Self-
awareness helps the individual to have better understanding about him, thus he can achieve
unfathomable success by just being self-aware. People are usually not self-aware; they have to
develop self-awareness to make changes in their thoughts, perception and interpretation so that
they can move forward in life with sustained growth. A self-aware person focuses his time and
energy on improving his behaviour so that he can grow in life; he is not living in some bubble
assuming he is something else, while he is not. A person can become self-aware by conducting a
SWOT analysis on oneself, the SWOT analysis gives him amazing insight on his strengths, which he
can leverage to walk the life, in the similar manner by getting to know his weakness, and he works
towards converting them into his strength (Maier & Prigatano, 2017). I myself was not self-aware,
but when a friend pursued me to conduct a SWOT analysis, I was amazed to see the result. I realized
I have a stage fear of public speaking and it was one of the reasons why I was unable to
communicate effectively, thus was always behind my promotion. People who were less experienced
than me got easy promotions because they were effective in their communication, hence after
realizing that it is my weakness which is hampering my professional growth, I worked on it and now I
am in much better position. Thus becoming self-aware is great for one’s own growth and for the
growth of the organization.
Cross cultural communication is the new norm in the expanding business scenarios, with the
increasing penetration of internet it has become increasingly important to focus on cross cultural
communication. Cross cultural communication is important for a company which has diversity in the
workforce, it involves a deeper understanding of how people from different culture speak,
communicate and see the world around them. People belong to different cultures and thus it is
important to understand the cultural diversity, it helps individuals to gain better insight about an
individual so that he can better understand when he is communicating. People in an organization
these days are trained towards different culture, what certain things mean in different cultures so
that by mistake they dot harm emotions of an individual’s (Prasad, 2015). However it can be seen as

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mutual acceptance understanding, the other person should also acknowledge that people have little
or less idea about their culture and hence should be tolerant towards any miscommunication.
Although in organization it is considered important to have effective cross cultural communication
for the sustainability in growth of the organization.
Organizations these days are moving in the direction of being ethical in the way they conduct
themselves. The growing euphoria about ethics in decision making is important as decision makers
have to ensure that they satisfy all the stakeholders and not just shareholders. It becomes extremely
important thus to choose the best ethical alternative while evaluating a particular scenario. The
ethics in decision making become more important because of cultural and society norms, People get
easily influenced and find it easy to get deflected from their ethics, but a man of principal always
follows ethics. He is much concerned about the growth of the community or the society, and does
not intend to hurt anyone’s feeling by being unethical in their conduct. Decisions are always a
double edged sword, it affects individuals and company and hence by being ethical in decision
making one is free of any kind of guilt from his conscience. Hence it is highly advised to consider
consequences before taking a decision, efforts should be made to take an ethical route always, a
company which works ethically employees the same culture in the organization and hence the entire
sphere is of strong ethical conduct, such an organization always flourishes. Ethical decision making in
itself gives pride and level of satisfaction to an individual as he knows that he has not done any
wrong to any individual and thus lives guilt free.
Hence the essay can be concluded by saying that effective communication is a must and should
quality that should be in an individual for his personal growth as well as growth of the organization.
In order to achieve the same barriers to communication has to be reduced significantly and
emphasis should be laid on the importance of cross cultural communication.

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References
Darling, J. R., & Beebe, S. A. (2007). Effective entrepreneurial communication in organization
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Ghobadi, S., & Mathiassen, L. (2016). Perceived barriers to effective knowledge sharing in agile
software teams. Information Systems Journal, 26(2), 95-125.
Haas, M. R., & Cummings, J. N. (2015). Barriers to knowledge seeking within MNC teams: Which
differences matter most?. Journal of International Business Studies, 46(1), 36-62.
Maier, F., & Prigatano, G. P. (2017). Impaired Self-Awareness of Motor Disturbances in Parkinson's
Disease. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 32(7), 802-809.
Prasad, R. (2015). Cross-cultural communication. Educating Young Children: Learning and Teaching
in the Early Childhood Years, 21(3), 21.
Sisson, D. C. (2017). Inauthentic communication, organization-public relationships, and trust: A
content analysis of online astroturfing news coverage. Public Relations Review, 43(4), 788-
795.
Yazdanparast, A., & Spears, N. (2018). The new me or the me I’m proud of? Impact of objective self-
awareness and standards on acceptance of cosmetic procedures. European Journal of
Marketing.