Management Course: Discussion Topic 5
jandreg
chap009.pptCommunicating
in Teams and Organizations
McGraw-Hill/Irwin
McShane/Von Glinow OB 5e
Copyright © 2010 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Social Networking Communication
at IBM
Standing in front of Beijing’s Forbidden City, IBM chief executive Sam Palmisano communicates through his Second Life avatar to several thousand employees worldwide.
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Communication Defined
- The process by which information is transmitted and understood between two or more people
- Effective communication
- Transmitting intended meaning (not just symbols)
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Importance of Communication
Coordinating work activities
Organizational learning and decision making
Employee well-being
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Receiver
Sender
Form
message
Transmit
Message
Transmit
Feedback
Communication Process Model
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Encode
feedback
Form
feedback
Encode
message
Noise
Decode
message
Receive
encoded
message
Decode
feedback
Receive
feedback
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Improving Communication Coding/Decoding
Both parties have motivation and ability to communicate through the channel
Both parties carry the same “codebook”
Both parties share similar mental models of the communication context
Sender is experienced at communicating the message topic
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About Face on Workplace E-Mail
HiWired executives introduced “Home Week” each month, in which they must not travel. This initiative has helped them rediscover the benefits of face-to-face rather than e-mail communication.
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How E-Mail has Altered Communication
- Now preferred medium for coordinating work
- Tends to increase communication volume
- Significantly alters communication flow
- Reduces some selective attention biases
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Problems with E-Mail
- Communicates emotions poorly
- Reduces politeness and respect
- Inefficient for ambiguous, complex, novel situations
- Increases information overload
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Social Networking Communication
Social network communication clusters people around interests/expertise
Several types of social network communication
- Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn
- Online discussion forums
- Avatar sites (e.g. Second Life)
- Instant messaging
- Wikis
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Nonverbal Communication
- Actions, facial gestures, etc.
- Influences meaning of verbal symbols
- Less rule bound than verbal communication
- Important part of emotional labor
- Most is automatic and nonconscious
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Emotional Contagion
- The automatic process of sharing another person’s emotions by mimicking their facial expressions and other nonverbal behavior
- Serves three purposes:
Provides continuous feedback to speaker
Increases emotional understanding of the other person’s experience
Communicates a collective sentiment -- sharing the experience
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I Love Rewards Gets Media-Rich Quickly
Every day at 11:15 am, employees at I Love Rewards Inc. meet face-to-face for 10 minutes to communicate priorities and coordinate their efforts. These quick meetings provide a personal connection and highly interactive feedback.
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Choosing the Best Communication Channel: Social Acceptance
How well the communication channel is approved and supported by the organization, team, and individual:
Communication channel norms
Individual communication channel preferences
Symbolic meaning of the communication channel
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Choosing the Best Communication Channel: Media Richness
The channel’s data-carrying capacity needs to be aligned with the communication activity
High richness when channel:
conveys multiple cues
allows timely feedback
allows customized message
permits complex symbols
Use rich communication media when the situation is nonroutine and ambiguous
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Oversimplified
Zone
Overloaded
Zone
Nonroutine/
Ambiguous
Rich
Media
Richness
Situation
Hierarchy of Media Richness
Lean
Routine/clear
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Factors that Override Media Richness
- Ability to multi-communicate with lean channels
- More varied proficiency levels
- Social distractions of rich channels
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Persuasive Communication
- Changing another person’s beliefs and attitudes.
- Spoken communication is more persuasive because:
accompanied by nonverbal communication, adding emotional punch to the message.
has high quality immediate feedback whether message is understood and accepted.
has high social presence, so receiver is more sensitive to message content and more motivated to accept the message.
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Communication Barriers
- Perceptions
- Filtering
- Language
- Jargon
- Ambiguity
- Information Overload
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Information Overload
Information Load
Episodes of information overload
Employee’s information processing capacity
Time
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Managing Information Overload
- Solution 1: Increase info processing capacity
- Learn to read faster
- Scan through documents more efficiently
- Remove distractions
- Time management
- Temporarily work longer hours
- Solution 2: Reduce information load
- Buffering
- Omitting
- Summarizing
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Thumbs Up to the Boss!
In Australia, a co-worker asked Patricia Oliveira why she laughed when he gave the thumbs up that everything is OK. She explained that this gesture “means something not very nice” in her home country of Brazil. After hearing this, several co-workers gave the boss a lot more thumbs up signs!
©Mark M. Lawrence/Corbis
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Cross-Cultural Communication
- Verbal differences
- Language
- Voice intonation
- Silence/conversational overlaps
- Nonverbal differences
- Interpreting nonverbal meaning
- Importance of verbal versus nonverbal
©Mark M. Lawrence/Corbis
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Men
Women
Gender Communication Differences
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Gives advice quickly and directly
Gives advice indirectly and reluctantly
Report talk
Rapport talk
Conversations are negotiations of status
Conversations are bonding events
Less sensitive to nonverbal cues
More sensitive to nonverbal cues
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Getting Your Message Across
Empathize
Repeat the message
Use timing effectively
Be descriptive
Courtesy of Microsoft.
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Active
Listening
Active Listening Process & Strategies
Sensing
• Postpone evaluation
• Avoid interruptions
• Maintain interest
Evaluating
• Empathize
• Organize information
Responding
• Show interest
• Clarify the message
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Communicating in Hierarchies
- Workspace design
- Clustering people in teams
- Open office arrangements
- Web-based organizational communication
- Wikis -- collaborative document creation
- Blogs -- personal news/opinion for sharing
- E-zines -- rapid distribution of company news
- Direct communication with management
- Management by walking around (MBWA)
- Town hall meetings
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Organizational Grapevine
- Early research findings
- Transmits information rapidly in all directions
- Follows a cluster chain pattern
- More active in homogeneous groups
- Transmits some degree of truth
- Changes due to internet
- Email becoming the main grapevine medium
- Social networks are now global
- Public blogs and forums extends gossip to everyone
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Grapevine Benefits/Limitations
- Benefits
- Fills in missing information from formal sources
- Strengthens corporate culture
- Relieves anxiety
- Signals that problems exist
- Limitations
- Distortions might escalate anxiety
- Perceived lack of concern for employees when company info is slower than grapevine
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Communicating
in Teams and Organizations
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McGraw-Hill/Irwin
McShane/Von Glinow OB 5e
Copyright © 2010 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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