Sun Down Bakery Case Study

Ques 1: Analyze the likely causes of the resentment over the employee manual and uniforms by considering the impact of the sender, message, decoding, feedback, context, and probable sources of noise. Describe how the problems you identified could have been minimized by different communication strategies?

The main causes of resentment over the employee manual and uniforms by the Sundown bakery employees are high context & low context difference and the communication channel used to communicate the important messages & employee manual.

As we have analyzed in the case there are different nationality people are working in the Bakery. Where there is lot of diversity in the work place then it becomes very critical to understand the cultural differences, use of logic & understanding of verbal & nonverbal cues.

Another issue is use of communication channel in the Bakery to communicate with the employees. As it was observed the important policies & manuals were distributed to the employees in the form of memos. The communication with the employees was in the bureaucratic form and they were not allowed to take a participation in the decision making.

It would have been a better recommendation to hold a meeting a face to face read the memo in the presence of Carol and Bruce so that the employees issues could be addressed and the workers would also be able to associate themselves with the organization. As there feedback would be given importance which was missing in the situation.

The communication process begins with a sender, the person who transmits a message. The sender must choose certain words or nonverbal methods to send an intentional message. This activity is called encoding.

The channel (sometimes called the medium) is the method used to deliver a message. The receiver must still decode it, attaching meaning to the words or symbols. Receivers don't just absorb messages like sponges; they interpret and respond to them. The evident response of a receiver to a sender's message is called feedback.

One of the greatest sources of communication problems is noise. The most obvious type of noise is external (also called physical) noise. A second kind of noise is physiological: hearing disorders, illnesses, disabilities, and other factors make it difficult to send or receive messages. The third type of noise is psychological —forces within the sender or receiver that interfere with understanding, such as egotism, defensiveness, assumptions, stereotypes, biases, prejudices, hostility, preoccupation, and fear.

The story of Sundown Bakery shows that, as organizations grow, a system

for managing the flow of communication has to develop. The regular patterns of

communications between people are called communication networks. Two kinds of networks exist: formal and informal.