Miscommunication in Business Communication: A Case Study

Write a Short Scenario In Which The Communication Process Does Not Go Well For The People Involved. It Should Be a Business Communication.

Discuss The Situation Rather Than Preparing a Dialogue Recreating The Situation. Using The Model As Your Guide, Walk Through The Communication Process To Show Where And Why Communication Broke Down.

Explain Who The People Were, What Medium Was Used, What Messages Were Encoded And Decoded, What The Barriers Were, And What Contexts Existed.

Explain How The Communication Process Could Be Improved. Use Textbook, At Minimum As Citation And Reference. Do Not Use Blogs, Websites Selling Services Or Other Cheat Sites. 

Business communication is multifaceted in character and the manner by which it is conducted depends on the type of business scenario or situation in which the communication is being carried out (Boyee et al., 2016). This assignment discusses a business communication scenario that goes wrong, with a lot of misunderstanding taking place between the people who are involved in the communication process. The assignment concludes with some recommendations on how such miscommunication can be navigated and avoided.

At a supermarket located in New York City, an Indian man was buying groceries for the weekend. He was buying a lot of things, that he felt was needed for a comfortable weekend that lay ahead of him. The man was quiet and timid by nature and by the time that his shopping was over the shopping cart or trolley that he was using to keep his goods was already overloaded. Having migrated to the United States of America only very recently, the man had some tendencies that are unique to Indian situations, and unable to pile more goods onto his shopping cart, and with there being no other available shopping cart at the time, he decided to stuff some goods into his pockets. He did so with the sole intention of paying for them when at the cash counter for check out. When he proceeded to the cash counter, the cashier, a white American looked at him stiffly and started the accounting process. The final bill was presented to him and it appeared that the man had forgotten about the few goods which were stuffed in his pockets. As he bent over slightly to reach for his wallet, the goods in his pocket fell out. The man apologized immediately but before he could say anything the cashier had sounded the alarm, indicating to everyone around them that this man was a thief, and that he was trying to steal goods by keeping them in his pocket. Although the man apologized vehemently and stated that he had genuinely forgotten about the goods in his pocket, the cashier, who appeared to be white supremacist branded him as being a typical thief like most Indians, a law breaker and who deserved to spend a night behind bars for his alleged act of crime. The man broke down into tears and tried to explain the situation. The store detective came forward and let the man go, only after charging him a hefty fine of 100 USD for an alleged attempt at theft (Zerfass & Viertmann, 2017).

The miscommunication which took place above occurred because of cultural differences and racism (Pearson, 2017). The cashier was racist, and was under the misplaced view that Indians are naturally thieving by character. The store detective also did not question this misconception on the part of the cashier and charged the Indian customer a fine of 100 USD. The way to avert such miscommunication in the future is to ensure that people handling transactions at supermarkets are culturally sensitized, especially in a multicultural destination like New York City (Sanina et al., 2017).

References

Bovée, C. L., Thill, J. V., & Raina, R. L. (2016). Business communication today. Pearson Education India.

Pearson, R. (2017). Business ethics as communication ethics: Public relations practice and the idea of dialogue. In Public relations theory (pp. 111-131). Routledge.

Sanina, A., Balashov, A., Rubtcova, M., & Satinsky, D. M. (2017). The effectiveness of communication channels in government and business communication. Information Polity, 22(4), 251-266

Zerfass, A., & Viertmann, C. (2017). Creating business value through corporate communication. Journal of Communication Management.