Chapter 15 - Interpersonal and Organizational Communication PDF

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Interpersonal and Organizational Communication: Mastering the Exchange of Information...

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Interpersonal and Organizational Communication Mastering the Exchange of Information ©Olivier Renck/Aurora/Getty Images

After reading this chapter, you should be able to: LO 15-1 Describe the communication process. LO 15-2 Compare communication channels and

appropriate ways for managers to use them. LO 15-3 Identify barriers to communication and ways

managers can overcome them. LO 15-4 Discuss how managers can successfully use

social media to communicate. LO 15-5 Identify ways for managers to improve their

listening, writing, and speaking skills. LO 15-6 Review the techniques for improving the

career readiness competency of networking.

FORECAST

What’s Ahead in This Chapter

This chapter describes the process of transferring information and understanding between individuals and groups. It also describes several communication barriers—physical, personal, cross-cultural, nonverbal, and gender differences. It shows how you can use different channels and patterns of communication, both formal and informal, to your advantage. It discusses how managers use information technology to communicate more effectively. We also provide recommendations for becoming a better listener, writer, and speaker. We conclude with a Career Corner that focuses on developing the career readiness competency of networking.

Improving Your Use of Empathy Have you ever had a conversation that left you worried or unsatisfied because you could tell the other person didn’t really understand what you were feeling? One of the key components of effective communication is empathy, the ability to perceive and share other people’s feelings. It’s part of the career readiness skill of emotional intelligence and represents a natural human ability everyone has, and one that you can actively improve. Empathy will help you gain a better and more accurate understanding of what’s really going on when you communicate with others at work—what they need, what they’re feeling, why they’re saying what they’re saying, and even what they aren’t saying. That, in turn, will help shape your response and make you a better communicator with stronger work and personal relationships. In fact, the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations has traced a link between empathy and sales success and other types of superior performance, especially in teams.1 Empathy also improves your leadership and your ability to defuse conflict.2 It should be easy to see that someone who conveys empathy and understanding toward others will more easily earn their respect and thus be better able to lead and direct them. And your ability to resolve conflict ultimately depends on your being able to see what matters to all the parties and what each side hopes to achieve. Empathy can even improve your performance in job interviews by helping you understand what the interviewer needs in a new hire. In this way, you can show why you’re the right one for the job.3 Here are some suggestions for developing empathy and strengthening your emotional intelligence in the process.4

Practice Your Best Listening Skills Interrupting others, or even thinking about how you’re going to respond instead of actually listening to what’s being said, prevents you from focusing on the other person and their message. Checking your phone during in person conversations also limits you ability to focus on what is being said.

Observe Nonverbal Cues Pay attention to the speaker’s body language, facial expression, and tone of voice. Are these giving a message that contradicts the words being spoken? Try to find out why. Watch your own nonverbal behavior, too. For instance, maintain comfortable eye contact while listening and speaking.

Ask Yourself, “What You Would Do in the Other Person’s Place?” If you’re having trouble understanding where someone is coming from, try asking yourself what you would do if the situation were reversed and you were in that person’s shoes. This imagined swap is the essence of empathy because it lets you perceive and feel what the other person is seeing, hearing, and feeling.

Know Your Audience Whether you’re making a presentation to a group or speaking one-on-one, be sure you understand how much your audience already knows about the topic on which you’re speaking. Use that knowledge to avoid overexplaining or leaving people in the dark.

Smile Smiling doesn’t just automatically raise your own spirits (try it and see). It also makes you look friendlier and more open to others’ views and ideas. Showing genuine interest in others is a hallmark of empathy.

For Discussion One way to put these suggestions into practice is to challenge yourself to have a substantive conversation in which you really connect with someone you consider difficult to communicate with or with whom you frequently disagree. Can you make a plan to try this? Which tips will be most helpful to you?

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15.1 The Communication Process: What It Is, How It Works THE BIG PICTURE Communication is the transfer of information and understanding from one person to another. The process involves sender, message, and receiver; encoding and decoding; the medium; feedback; and “noise,” or interference. Managers need to tailor their communication to the appropriate medium (rich or lean) for the appropriate situation.

LO 15-1 Describe the communication process.

How good a communicator do you think you are? A survey of 200 U.S. employers and 4,200 graduating seniors revealed that while nearly 80 percent of the college students in the survey believed they were competent in both oral and written communication, only 42 percent of employers thought students were correct about their oral skills, and only 56 percent said students had good writing skills.5

Communication Defined: The Transfer of Informationand Understanding

You don’t have to shout to communicate. ©Comstock Images/ Alamy Stock Photo

Researchers have begun to examine communication as a form of social information processing, in which receivers interpret messages by cognitively processing them. This work has led to development of a perceptual model of communication that depicts it as a process in which receivers create meaning in their own minds.6 Communication—the transfer of information and understanding from one person to another—is an activity that you as a manager will have to do a lot. The fact that managers do a lot of communicating doesn’t mean they’re necessarily good at it—that is, that they are efficient or effective. You are an efficient communicator when you can transmit your message accurately in the least time. You are an effective communicator when your intended message is accurately understood by the o other person. Thus, you may well be efficient in sending a group of people a reprimand by e-mail. But it may not be effective if it makes k them angry so that they can’t absorb its meaning. The “I’m glad . . .” feature below illustrates how Donna Mostrom reacted to positive communication from her manager. These skills are a good role model for managers.

I’m glad… …my manager was an effective communicator. Donna Mostrom worked as an assistant vice president in the supply chain department of a beauty consumer-packaged goods company. Her manager was a good listener, he gave constructive criticism, and he partnered with Donna to solve problems. “He was completely honest with me, and I loved it. Before I even started the job, he told me all the pros and cons about the company culture, so I went in with my eyes open. And he told me all the things he would do specifically to help me succeed,” said Donna.

When meeting with Donna, the manager let her talk first so all her questions were answered during the allotted time. He listened and tried never to interrupt her. If they did run out of time to address Donna’s questions during the meeting, he never kept Donna past the time. Instead, he rescheduled another meeting to address her questions. Her manager always made sure that Donna had a clear understanding. “He never sent me all the way back to the drawing board. It was never an impossible ask. There was

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was confident that he would work with her to always a confirmation that I understood what he solve problems rather than just directing her to was asking for or what he needed,” said Donna. complete tasks. “He was always incredibly accessible. If he For example, Donna once suggested to her was traveling, he would jump on the phone. He manager that she travel to each of the compawas very thorough in his responses, and he would ny’s plants to meet face-to-face with the plant make sure I had whatever was needed. But he workers when they rolled out a new training proalways put the focus on me and my needs before cess. While this was different from what the combringing up his own needs,” said Donna. “He pany normally did, Donna’s manager was willing would always go over the positives. If he wanted to partner with her to come up with a creative me to change anything, he would say, ‘I really like solution. The initiative was a success. this, but this is actually what I’m looking for. What Courtesy Donna Mostrom “People really liked him and had a lot of do you think?’ It was never a directive. He was respect for him,” said Donna. The manager’s never demanding that I do something.” Donna’s manager was able to build trust by being honest effective communication skills went a long way with his and direct, by listening before speaking, and by being accessi- employees. ble. Once a good working relationship had been built, Donna Courtesy of Donna Mostrom

How the Communication ProcessWorks Communication has been said to be a process consisting of “a sender transmitting a message through media to a receiver who responds.”7 A diagram of this communication process is shown below. (See Figure 15.1.) Let’s take a look at its different parts.

Sender, Message, and Receiver

The sender is the person wanting to share information—called a message—and the receiver is the person for whom the message is intended, as follows. Sender → Message → Receiver

Did you finish your assignment?

2. Message is transmitted through a medium (e.g., telephone).

What assignment do you mean? me an?

Noise! (e.g., static, slurring)

1. Sender encodes message, selects medium (e.g., telephone).

4. Receiver expresses reaction, or feedback, through a medium.

3. decodes 3 Receiver Rec the message, decides if feedback needed.

FIGURE 15.1 The communication process “Noise” is not just noise or loud background sounds but any disturbance that interferes with transmission—static, fadeout, distracting facial expressions, an uncomfortable meeting site, competing voices, and so on. (male): ©Fuse/Getty Images; (female): ©Takayuki/Shutterstock

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Encoding and Decoding

Of course, the process isn’t as simple as just sender/message/receiver. If you were an old-fashioned telegraph operator using Morse code to send a message over a telegraph line, you would first have to encode the message, and the receiver would have to decode it. But the same is true when you are sending the message by voice to another person in the same room and have to decide what language to speak in and what terms to use, and when you are texting a friend and can choose your words, your abbreviations and even an emoji or two. Encoding is translating a message into understandable symbols or language. Decoding is interpreting and trying to make sense of the message. Thus, the communication pro-

cess is now Sender [Encoding] → Message → [Decoding] Receiver

The Medium

The means by which you as a communicator send a message is important, whether it is typing a text or an e-mail, hand-scrawling a note, or communicating by voice in person or by phone or videoconference. This means is the medium, the pathway by which a message travels:

Sender [Encoding] → Message [Medium] Message → [Decoding] Receiver

Feedback “Flight 123, do you copy?” In the movies, that’s what you hear the flight controller say when radioing the pilot of a troubled aircraft to see whether he or she received (“copied”) the previous message. And the pilot may radio back, “Roger, Houston, I copy.” This acknowledgment is an example of feedback, whereby the receiver expresses his or her reaction to the sender’s message. Sender [Encoding]

Message [Medium] Message

[Feedback]

[Decoding] Receiver

Message

Feedback is essential in communication so that the person sending the message can know whether the receiver understood it in the same way the sender intended—and whether he or she agrees with it. It is an essential component of communication accuracy and can be facilitated by paraphrasing. Paraphrasing occurs when people restate in their own words the crux of what they heard or read. It clarifies that a message was accurately understood. If you want to ensure that someone understands something you said, ask him or her to paraphrase your message.

Noise

Unfortunately, the entire communication process can be disrupted at several different points by noise—any disturbance that interferes with the transmission of a message. Noise can occur in the medium, of course, in the form of static in a radio transmission, fadeout on a cell phone, or loud music when you’re trying to talk in a restaurant. Laptops, for example, are a source of noise when used by college students to take notes during lectures. A growing body of research shows that “college students learn less when they use computers or laptops during lectures. They also tend to earn worse grades,” according to The New York Times. The decrease in learning is thought to occur “because students can type faster than they can write,” which results in the lecturer’s words going “right to the students typing fingers without stopping in their brains for substantive processing.”8 In contrast, writing by hand requires students to process and condense spoken words so they can record their thoughts on paper. Further, noise can occur in the encoding or decoding, as when people from different cultures stumble over each other’s languages. One of your authors—Angelo Kinicki—was consulting in Asia and found, for instance, that his suggestion that Asian managers “touch base” (a baseball reference) with their colleagues drew blank looks. We discuss cross-cultural barriers to communication later in the chapter.

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Even within the same culture, we can encounter semantic problems (problems that revolve around the meaning of words). When a supervisor tells you, “We need to get this done right away,” what does it mean? Does “We” mean just you? You and your co-workers? Or you, your co-workers, and the boss? Does “right away” mean today, tomorrow, or next week? Another language barrier is jargon. Jargon is terminology specific to a particular profession or group. (Example: “The HR VP wants the RFP to go out ASAP.” Translation: “The vice president of human resources wants the request for proposal to go out as soon as possible.”) Buzzwords are designed to impress rather than inform. (Example: “Could our teams interface on the ad campaign that went viral, and then circle back with the boss?”)9 Noise also occurs in nonverbal communication (discussed later in this chapter), when our physical movements and our words send different messages.

EXAMPLE

Secrecy and Silence

Volkswagen Volkswagen’s fortunes have been imperiled after the 2015 revelation that about 11 million of its diesel cars were equipped with the means to cheat federal emissions tests. CEO Mattias Mueller blames the company’s “culture of silence” for preventing employees at many levels from speaking out about “Dieselgate.” Volkswagen’s former CEO Martin Winterkorn even received a memo about “irregularities” in the cars’ emissions but reportedly did nothing.10 The scheme went on for about 10 years before a U.S. nonprofit group discovered what was going on.11 Volkswagen admitted in 2017 that executives had lied to and misled the Environmental Protection Agency about certain vehicles’ compliance with U.S. emissions standards.12 The company pleaded guilty to three felony counts and agreed to pay a $2.8 billion criminal fine. The automaker also agreed to pay another $1.5 billion civil penalty to settle environmental, customs, and financial claims.13

and the company’s chemists and engineers were discouraged from discussing their work, even with one another. The resulting “silo” effect prevented staff from collaborating to solve problems with the company’s blood-testing products, which failed to live up to Holmes’s public claims that they would be innovative. Holmes continued to deny problems with Theranos products, even as multiple investigations into the company began. She falsely claimed that a 2015 product recall ordered by the Food and Drug Administration was voluntary and even gave inaccurate presentations to employees. Employees didn’t

Theranos Secrecy was an operational mandate at Theranos Inc., a biomedical testing company founded by former CEO Elizabeth Holmes. Different departments had separate key cards for entry,

Martin Winterkorn. Dr. Martin Winterkorn resigned as Volkswagen’s CEO in September 2015 after the Environmental Protection Agency began investigating emission test issues. ©Bernhard Classen/Alamy Stock Photo

Elizabeth Holmes. Elizabeth Holmes, CEO of Theranos, speaking to Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Conference. Neither Holmes or Theranos admitted or denied the SEC’s allegations. ©Krista Kennell/Shutterstock

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actually learn the extent of the company’s troubles until investigators’ reports were released to the press.14 Holmes settled fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018 by giving up 18.9 million Theranos shares and paying a $500,000 fine. She was also barred from running a public company for 10 years.15 The former CEO still faces a separate civil suit initiated by Theranos investors.16

YOUR CALL In terms of the communications process modeled in Figure 15.1, do you think a “culture of silence” can constitute a form of noise? What about the “silo” effect? At what other point or points in the communication model do you think silence and secrecy can interfere with communication?

Selecting the Right Medium for Effective Communication All kinds of communication tools are available to managers, ranging from one-to-one face-to-face conversation all the way to use of the mass media. However, managers need to know how to use the right tool for the right condition—when to use e-mail or when to meet face-to-face, for example. Should you congratulate a team for exceeding its goals by addressing the group in person, sending an e-mail, posting an announcement near the office coffee machine—or all three? What medium would you select for delivering a reprimand? All media have their own advantages and disadvantages, and there are a few different criteria to consider when choosing the right medium. 17 For instance, texts and tweets require the writer to be brief and precise, and like e-mails (which generally are brief), they provide a record of the communication that in-person and phone communication don’t. They can also be sent almost without regard to time-zone differences. But unlike voice, video call, and in-person messages, written communications often fail to convey nuances of meaning through tone of voice and body language, and...