Leading Human Resources: An Analysis (part 21)

External and Internal Noise

by

Charles Lamson

External noise is noise that occurs outside the brain of the decoder. Examples include your stomach growling during a meeting, a tree growing and blocking your company's sign, watching a newsbreak on television, or being interrupted by a phone call and not paying attention to the caller. All of these things are external noise because they can distract from the communication. An effective leader must be aware of possible external factors that could interfere with the communication and act accordingly to minimize those factors. For example, instead of talking next to a punch press, an effective leader would find a quieter place to communicate with the followers.

Internal noise can be created in at least four different ways. First, internal noise occurs because we each have a brain. If a person is talking at 125 words per minute and you have the ability to listen effectively at 200 words per minute and the ability to think at a much higher word per minute rate, your brain decides to use the "free" word per minute spaces to do other things.

Paul Cameron, a professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, conducted a study with 85 college sophomores. An associate made a loud noise 21 times during professor Cameron's lectures over the length of the course. The students had been told that they needed to encode their thoughts at that time. The results reported to the American Psychological Association showed that 20 percent of the students were reminiscing about something, 20 percent were thinking about romance, 20 percent were actually paying attention, 12 percent were actively listening, and the rest were worrying, daydreaming, thinking about lunch, or thinking about religion. In other words, 88 percent of this population were not actively involved in the lecture due to internal noise. Imagine what occurs during a committee meeting.

Second, external noises can also cause internal noise. Your stomach or another person's stomach growling may produce thoughts in the brain that cry out for lunch instead of paying attention to the discussion. The overwhelming smell of perfume or cologne may cause multiple reactions in your brain, from romance to revulsion. If you are focused on a breaking news story, you may not remember a phone conversation. And, there may be so much noise on, for example, the factory floor that the follower would not even bother to listen.



The third way internal noise can be created is through the perception process of individuals involved in the communication. Every person has a distinct method for selecting, organizing, and interpreting verbal or nonverbal cues (Coon, 1992). For example, a person hears the term "leader" during a presentation. This term may evoke different thoughts in different people. A person who disliked a previous leader would interpret the term in a negative way; a person who admired a previous leader would think of the term positively. Internal noise can then be created as the former person would begin to think of the disliked leader; the other person would begin to think of the admired leader with neither paying any attention to the communicative acts occurring around them.

The fourth way internal noise can be created is through the perceptual process. People do not behave on the basis of truth and reality. Their behavior is evoked from their perception and interpretation of truth and reality. These perceptions and interpretations are the product of information taken in through the senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. So much information comes in that people cannot attend to it all. Through selective awareness, psychological maps are formed from only part of the information. Behavior is based on these maps. And the maps affect what people perceive. Communication effectiveness is enhanced if you understand the way people map their psychological worlds.

People use their psychological maps to make decisions, to get around in life. However, the map is not the territory. It is based upon perceptions of that territory. And these perceptions differ from person to person.



Here is an example of how perception affects behavior. Some friends made a reservation at a seaside restaurant that has a world famous view of the ocean and the crashing surf. Their reservations were for 7:00 P.M., but they arrived a little early. To their dismay, they watched as other groups entered the restaurant and were seated. Time passed, and it was now 7:10 P.M. Convinced that they had been snubbed or ignored by the management of the restaurant, they were about to make an angry complaint to the maitre d' when he approached. "May I seat you now?" he said, as he led them to one of the best tables, where they had a spectacular view. "I am sorry for the delay, but the previous party just wouldn't leave!" The friends' perception was opposite of what was really happening. Instead of snubbing them, the restaurant management was doing its best to seat them at a table with an excellent view. Had the situation been explained earlier, they would not have been so impatient, and they would have perceived the situation entirely differently.

*SOURCE: MANAGEMENT OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR: LEADING HUMAN RESOURCES, 8TH ED., 2001, PAUL HERSEY, KENNETH H. BLANCHARD, DEWEY E. JOHNSON, PGS. 300-302*

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