In addition, the many breakdowns in communication can be further attributed to the perception factor. This creates potential biasness regardless of whether they understood the communication put across. Hence, it is usually more of an acceptance problem than a communication problem.
First, we will look into how diversity brings about some positive effects on communication, and we will show how diversity actually improves communication within groups.
Proponents of diversity hold that differences among group members give rise to varied ideas, perspectives, knowledge, and skills that can improve their ability to solve problems and accomplish their work. This enables unique and effective results to be created and obtained. Compared to an individualistic organizational culture, a collectivistic culture enhanced social interaction and creative performance to a greater degree in diverse groups than homogeneous groups.
Diversity also contributes to good representation of various people and organisations. Any rectification made to problems would have considered the concerns of the group.
The need to understand diversity also helps improve communication within a diverse group, as people are more apt to handle diversity. This will also bring about an increase in tolerance towards differences in people.
We will go on to show how diversity does not cause communication problems. Taking a homogeneous group as an example. Members of homogeneous groups are similar. This helps smooth the social interactions among members of these groups. It will be easy to say that communication problems will not occur in this sort of groups. With “Groupthink”, solutions come more quickly than in a diverse group. But with this comes a lack of communication and this in itself is an inherent communication problem. This would be reflected through the quality of the decisions made, as there would be no member of the group with an alternative view that would check the assumptions made by the others. This could lead to them making highly biased decisions.
Therefore, in order to improve communication in a diverse group, we need to do two things: - practice diversity management and improve personal communication skills.
Diversity management involves raising awareness and acceptance of the inherent existence of diversity between every person, and creating the right environment for the members of the group to reach their highest potential. Next, improving communication skills would allow members however diverse to quickly open channels of communications. Improving communication skills requires much conscience effort and entails among other skills, skills of good listening, asking right questions, crafting clear unambiguous sentences, watching for body language and maintaining good eye contact. By diversity management and improving communication skills, collective synergy and creativity that is only available in diverse groups may be unlocked and harnessed fully.
Diversity does not cause communications problems; it simply exposes our intolerance of differences, our lack of communication skills, and our dire need to improve in both aspects.
