"The MGMT Solution," Vocabulary from Chapter 15

Indeed, much of the basic management process—planning, organizing, leading, and controlling—cannot be performed without effective communication. If this weren’t reason enough to study communication, consider that effective oral communication—achieved by listening, following instructions, conversing, and giving feedback—is the most important skill for college graduates who are entering the work force.

And since communication is the process of transmitting information from one person or place to another, perception is obviously a key part of communication.

Yet perception can also be a key obstacle to communication.

People experience stimuli through their own perceptual filters—the personality-, psychology-, or experience-based differences that influence them to ignore or pay attention to particular stimuli.

Because of filtering, people exposed to the same information will often disagree about what they saw or heard.

Selective perception is the tendency to notice and accept objects and information consistent with our values, beliefs, and expectations, while ignoring or screening out inconsistent information.

Once we have initial information about a person, event, or process, closure is the tendency to fill in the gaps where information is missing, that is, to assume that what we don’t know is consistent with what we already do know.

Not surprisingly, when closure occurs, people sometimes fill in the gaps with inaccurate information, which can create problems for organizations.

According to attribution theory, we use two general reasons or attributions to explain people’s behavior: an internal attribution, in which behavior is thought to be voluntary or under the control of the individual; and an external attribution, in which behavior is thought to be involuntary and outside of the control of the individual.

The defensive bias is the tendency for people to perceive themselves as personally and situationally similar to someone who is having difficulty or trouble.

The reason is that they are committing the fundamental attribution error, which is the tendency to ignore external causes of behavior and to attribute other people’s actions to internal causes.

The self-serving bias is the tendency to overestimate our value by attributing successes to ourselves (internal causes) and attributing failures to others or the environment (external causes).

Encoding means putting a message into a verbal (written or spoken) or symbolic form that can be recognized and understood by the receiver.

The sender then transmits the message via communication channels.

With some communication channels such as the telephone and face-to-face communication, the sender receives immediate feedback, whereas with others such as email (or text messages and file attachments), fax, and letters, the sender must wait for the receiver to respond.

Decoding is the process by which the receiver translates the verbal or symbolic form of the message into an understood message.

Feedback makes senders aware of possible miscommunications and enables them to continue communicating until the receiver understands the intended message.

Noise is anything that interferes with the transmission of the intended message.

Upward communication is used to give higher-level managers feedback about operations, issues, and problems; to help higher-level managers assess organizational performance and effectiveness; to encourage lower-level managers and employees to participate in organizational decision making; and to give those at lower levels the chance to share their concerns with higher-level authorities.

The grapevine arises out of curiosity, that is, the need to know what is going on in an organization and how it might affect you or others. To satisfy this curiosity, employees need a consistent supply of relevant, accurate, in-depth information about “who is doing what and what changes are occurring within the organization.”

In contrast to coaching, counseling is communicating with someone about non-job-related issues such as stress, child care, health issues, retirement planning, or legal issues that may be affecting or interfering with the person’s performance.

Kinesics (from the Greek word kinesis, meaning “movement”) are movements of the body and face. These movements include arm and hand gestures, facial expressions, eye contact, folding arms, crossing legs, and leaning toward or away from another person.

Para language includes the pitch, rate, tone, volume, and speaking pattern (use of silences, pauses, or hesitations) of one’s voice.

In short, because nonverbal communication is so informative, especially when it contradicts verbal communication, managers need to learn how to monitor and control their nonverbal behaviors.

Oral communication includes face-to-face interactions and group meetings through telephone calls, videoconferencing, or any other means of sending and receiving spoken messages. Studies show that managers generally prefer oral communication over written because it provides the opportunity to ask questions about parts of the message that they don’t understand.

Paraphrasing and summarizing give the speaker the chance to correct the message if the active listener has attached the wrong meaning to it. Paraphrasing and summarizing also show the speaker that the active listener is interested in the speaker’s message.

Empathetic listening goes beyond active listening because it depends on our ability to set aside our own attitudes or relationships to be able to see and understand things through someone else’s eyes. Empathetic listening is just as important as active listening, especially for managers, because it helps build rapport and trust with others.

Destructive feedback is disapproving without any intention of being helpful and almost always causes a negative or defensive reaction in the recipient.

Immediate feedback is much more effective than delayed feedback because manager and worker can recall the mistake or incident more accurately and discuss it in detail.

Specific feedback focuses on particular acts or incidents that are clearly under the control of the employee.

Collaborative discussion sites are typically organized by topic, project, or person and can take the shape of blogs that allow readers to post comments, wikis to allow collaborative discussions, document sharing and editing, or traditional discussion forums.

Online discussion forums use web- or software-based discussion tools to allow employees across the company to easily ask questions and share knowledge with each other.

Televised/videotaped speeches and meetings are simply speeches and meetings originally made to a small audience that are either simultaneously broadcast to other locations in the company or videotaped for subsequent distribution and viewing by a broader audience.

Broadcast voice mail gives top managers a quick, convenient way to address their work forces via oral communication—but only if people actually listen to the message, and that turns out to be a challenge with Generation Y workers.

Withholding information about organizational problems or issues is called organizational silence.

Company hotlines are phone numbers that anyone in the company can call anonymously to leave information for upper management.

Survey feedback is information that is collected by survey from organization members and then compiled, disseminated, and used to develop action plans for improvement.

Frequent informal meetings between top managers and lower-level employees are one of the best ways for top managers to hear what others think and feel.

Many people assume that top managers are at the center of everything that goes on in organizations, but top managers commonly feel isolated from most of their lower-level managers and employees.

External blogs and Twitter sites (micro blogs where entries are limited to 140 characters), written by people outside the company, can be a good way to find out what others are saying or thinking about your organization or its products or actions.