improve communication between the engineering and marketing staff in a large high-technology company.

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You have been hired as a consultant to improve communication between the engineering and marketing staff in a large high-technology company. Use the communication mode (attached)l and the four ways to improve that process (attached) to devise strategies to improve communication effectiveness among employees between these two work units.

Reference

McShane, S. L., & Von Glinow, M. A. (2013). Organizational behavior: Emerging knowledge, global reality (6th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.

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21 Chapter Nine Communicating in Team and again making decision without any information about the decision context, the alternatives ing its objectives. All of these ingredients require communication from coworkers as well as from stakeholders in the external environment. For example, airline cockpit crews make much better decisions and thereby cause far fewer accidents --- when the captain encour ages the crew to share information openly." A fourth function is to change behavior. When communicating to others, we are often trying to alter their beliefs and feelings and ultimately their behavior. This influence pro cess might be passive, such as merely describing the situation more clearly and fully Sometimes , the communication event is a deliberate attempt to change someone's thoughts and actions. We will discuss this function under the topic of persuasion later in this chapter. Finally, communication supports employee well-being. Informationally, communica tion conveys knowledge that helps employees better manage their work environment. For instance, research shows that new employees adjust much better to the organization when coworkers communicate subtle nuggets of wisdom, such as how to avoid office politics, complete work procedures correctly find useful resources, handle difficult customers, and so on." Emotionally, the communication experience itself is a soothing balm. Indeed, pro ple are less susceptible to colds, cardiovascular disease, and other physical and mental nesses when they have regular social interaction. In essence, people have an inherent drive to bond, to validate their self-worth, and to maintain their social identity. Communication is the means through which these drives and needs are fulfilled. A Model of Communication To understand the key interpersonal features of effective communication, let's examine the model presented in Exhibit 9.1, which provides a useful conduit metaphor for thinking about the communication process. According to this model, communication flows through channels between the sender and receiver. The sender forms a message and encodes it into words, gestures, voice intonations, and other symbols or signs. Next, the The process by which information encoded message is transmitted to the intended receiver through one or more commu- and understood nication channels (media). The receiver senses the incoming message and decodesit Web of more people into something meaningful. Ideally, the decoded meaning is what the sender had intended. Transmit message Receiver Sender EXHIBIT 9.1 The Communication Process Model Form message Encode message Receive *** encoded message Decode message Noise connect Receive encoded feedback Encode feedback (cca Form feedback Decode feedback nd Transmit feedback understood the transmitted message. This feedback may be a formal acknowledge In most situations, the sender looks for evidence that the other person received and such as "Yes, I know what you mean, or indirect evidence from the reces sequent actions. Notice that feedback repeats the communication process. Intende sender of the original message. This model recognizes that communications feedback is encoded, transmitted, received and decoded from the receive to the free-flowing conduit. Rather, the transmission of meaning from one person to another is hampered by mouse--the psychological, social, and structural barriers that distort and distorted or broken, the sender and receiver will not have a common obscure the sender's intended message. If any part of the communication process in understanding of the message. INFLUENCES ON EFFECTIVE ENCODING AND DECODING The communication process model suggests that communication effectiveness depends on the ability of sender and receiver to efficiently and accurately encode and decode informa tion. There are four main factors that influence the effectiveness of the encoding-decoding process." 1. Communication channel proficiency. Communication effectiveness improves when the sender and receiver are both motivated and able to communicate through the communication channel. Some people are better and more motivated to communi cate through face-to-face conversations. Others are awkward in conversations, yet are quite good at communicating via smartphone or text message technologies. Generally, the encoding-decoding process is more effective when both parties are skilled and enjoy using the selected communication channel." 2. Similar codrhooks. The sender and receiver rely on "codebooks," which are diction aries of symbols, language, gestures, idioms, and other tools used to convey infor mation. With similar codebooks, communication participants are able to encode and decode more accurately, because they both have the same or similar meaning, Communication efficiency also improves because there is less need for redundancy (such as saying the same thing in different ways) or confirmation feedback ("So. you are saying that...?"). 3. Shared mental models of the communication context. Mental models are internal representations of the external world that allow us to visualize elements of a set ting and relationships among those elements (see Chapter 3). When sender and receiver have shared mental models, they have a common understanding of the environment relating to the information, so less communication is necessary to darify meaning about that context. Notice that sharing the same codebook differs from sharing the same mental models of the topic context. Codebooks are sym bols used to convey message content, whereas mental models are knowledge structures of the communication setting. For example, a Russian cosmen and American astronaut might have shared mental models about the design and technology onboard the international space station (communication comest), different codebooks) yet they experience poor communication because of language differences (en Experience encoding the message. As people gain experience communicating the subject matter, they become more proficient at using the codebook of sy bols to convey the message. For example, after speaking to several groups of about the company new product development, you learn which words and phrases Information to others cflect of job training or sports practice. The more experience and practice and af Communication Channels LO2 A critical part of the communication model is the channel or medium through which infor mation is transmitted. There are two main types of channels: verbal and nonverbal. Verbal communication uses words and occurs through either spoken or written channels. Nonver. bal communication is any part of communication that does not use words. Spoken and written communication are both verbal (le, they both use words), but they are quite differ- ent from each other and have different strengths and weaknesses in communication effec tiveness, which we discuss later in this section. Also, written communication traditionally has been much slower than spoken communication at transmitting messages, though electronic mail, Twitter tweets, and other Internet-based communication channels have significantly improved written communication efficiency INTERNET-BASED COMMUNICATION In the early 1960s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, university re- searchers began discussing how to collaborate better by connecting their computers through a network. Their rough vision of connected computers became a reality in 1969 as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). ARPANET initially had only a dozen or so connections and was very slow and expensive by today's stan- dards, but it marked the birth of the Internet. Two years later, a computer engineer devel- oping ARPANET sent the first electronic mail (e-mail) message between different computers on a network. By 1973. most communication on ARPANET was through e-mail. ARPANET was mostly restricted to U.S. Defense Department-funded research centers, so in 1979, two graduate students at Duke University developed a public network system, called Usenet. Usenet allowed people to post information that could be retrieved by anyone else on the network, making it the first public computer-mediated social network. We have come a long way since the early days of ARPANET and Usenet. The medium of choice in most workplaces today is e-mail, because messages can be quickly written, edited, and transmitted. Information can be appended and conveyed to many people with a simple click of a mouse. E-mail is also asynchronous (messages are sent and re- ceived at different times), so there is no need to coordinate a communication session With advances in computer search technology, e-mail software has also become an effi- cient filing cabinet." E-mail tends to be the preferred medium for sending well-defined information for deci sion making. It is also central for coordinating work, though text messaging and Twitter tweets might soon overtake e-mail for this objective. As e-mail has been introduced in the workplace over the past two decades, it has tended to increase the volume of communica- tion and significantly alter the flow of that information within groups and throughout the organization." Specifically, it has reduced some face-to-face and telephone communication but increased communication with people further up the hierarchy. Some social and orga- nizational status differences still exist with e-mail, but they are somewhat less apparent than in face-to-face communication. By hiding age, race, and other features, e-mail reduces already aware of the other person's personal characteristics stereotype biases. However, it also tends to increase reliance on stereotypes when we are PROBLEMS WITH E-MAIL In spite of the wonders of e-mail, anyone who has used this communication medium knows that it has its limitations. Here are the top four complaints Poor Medium for Communicating Emotions People rely on facial expressions and other nonverbal cues to interpret the emotional meaning of words e-mail lacks this parallel communication channel. People consistently and significantly underestimate the
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