Description of Module
In order to be successful, managers must be able to communicate effectively. This module describes the communication process and the various ways managers communicate to employees. Additionally, barriers to communication are presented.
Leaders can make the difference between success and failure.
We'll look at the basic approaches to determining what makes an effective leader and what differentiates leaders from non-leaders.
Required Readings
Textbook, ch. 10-11
Discussion Question
DQ 9: Identify and describe common barriers to effective communication.
Post your initial response (100 words minimum) and respond to two student postings. Initial responses should contain substantial content and incorporate concepts, terms, and theories from the learning material.
Due Date: Due on Wednesday, December 4, 2013
DQ 10: Identify when leadership may not be necessary.
Post your initial response (100 words minimum) and respond to two student postings. Initial responses should contain substantial content and incorporate concepts, terms, and theories from the learning material.
Due Date: Due on Thursday, December 5, 2013
DQ 10
ReplyDeleteIdentify when leadership may not be necessary.
Although leadership is a key element of conducting a group behavior within organization, there are some cases when it might be not necessary and even disruptive for effective work:
• In the case, when workers demonstrate high level of competence and professionalism, somebody leading them in their tasks might irritate them. For example, computer “genius” would barely follow a leader while fulfilling an assignment. He probably needs appropriate manager, who would state clear goals and tasks instead of inspiring him.
• There are some tasks that don’t assume any leadership during their execution. It could be routine, simple, well-organized and structured job. For example, the cleaning or painting carcasses don’t assume leaders’ inspiration.
• The degree of cohesiveness of the working team also influences the requirement for leader in such environment. Cohesive, well-focused and organized teams are less demanding a frontrunner. Moreover, in the case if there is a quick feedback during task performance, the necessity in leader also declines.
• Self-driven employees do not require leadership for their work activity. If there were no need for extra motivation and inspiration of employee in fulfilling assignments, strong leader would not contribute more in his productivity. Moreover, there are some tasks that already are satisfying. For instance, artists’ job, painting, or similar works demanding high level of creativity and originality mostly are self-satisfying and self-motivated for the person fulfilling them.
Excellent, Daria. Thank you.
DeleteDQ 9
ReplyDeleteThere are few barriers that limit effective communication:
• Filtering
Not always the information is completely accessible for a receiver, but a sender might purposely cover some issues or to represent those aspects of information the receiver has pleasure to hear. Such manipulation of information could be used in the upward communication, when employee tells what a boss wants to hear. This filtering of information distorts the reality and distracts the effective communication.
• Selective Perception
People tend to perceive the information selectively, on the base of their own motivations, wishes, experiences, or personal characteristics.
• Information Overload
In the case an excessive amount of information is delivered to a person, he would probably be unable to effectively use it. If there is too much to take into account about particular issue, a person could simply neglect, pass over, or forget significant part of reliable and relevant information, resulting in unproductive communication.
• Emotions
The same information could be interpreted differently when person is under the influence of different emotions or moods. For example, the information about change of work hours could be perceived positively if employee is in a good mood and feels himself happy, even though such changes might be inconvenient for him. Vice versa, the bad mood could exacerbate bad feeling of office hours’ change and make a worker distressed even more.
• Language
Same words and phrases could mean different things for different people. Good example of such phenomenon is using the slang or professional language. For instance, person without profound economic background would hardly understand financial paper even though each particular word is familiar to him.
• Silence
Concealment of such important issues as discrimination, harassment, corruption, or simply technological problems leads to management unawareness of challenges a company faces and does not allow to take appropriate measures to eliminate them.
• Communication Apprehension
Some people experience a communication apprehension, or social anxiety. It means that they have personal feelings of tension and anxiety during certain oral communication, or written communication, or both. As a result, they prefer no avoid it regardless of how useful it could be for the job. For example, stuttering could be a significant limiting factor for oral communication. It might lead to the reluctance to use phones, verbally interact with manager, co-workers, and clients, what decreases his overall productivity.
Excellent, Daria. Thank you.
DeleteDQ9
ReplyDeleteBarriers to successful and effective communication in the workplace usually happen quite often in nowadays organizations. In order to be able to fight them it is necessary to define their type and cause.
Usually barriers to communication fall into different groups:
- physical barriers such as walls or doors are quite straighforward, therefore, some companies successfully use the open-door principle. For instance, the door of manager, director or supervisor is always open for employees. Directly and indirectly employees can freely come in and discuss any possible issues and problems they might experience.
- language and cultural barriers. Language barrier usually refers to foreign workforce. Sometimes the responsibilities of foreign employees are not connected to communication (specific sciences, engineering, construction, medecine, etc). Therefore, without language knowledge people fail to communicate successfully. Cultural barriers are different to languages, since cultures, traditions and attitudes vary, misunderstandings can happen. We need not to forget about selective perception here: cultural barriers are the consequences of managerial shortcuts using selective perception and making wrong conclusions.
- emotional barriers happen as a result of communication fail. Some employees feel very closed to initiate communication, and most of the times managers simply do not have time to baby-sit employees who are not open and who simply avoid the communication. Although, it is necessary to try and create a friendly environment to help those who are shy, so they can overcome emotional barriers.
- Personality mirrors: every person is different, including childhood, background, experience, character, etc. Therefore, some people might be just different in understanding same problem, same task or idea. There are many personality types, and manager's job here becomes very tricky since he needs to unite all those "flowers" in one "bouquet".
DQ 10
There might me several situations when leadership becomes not necessary. Usually this happens at the workplace where teams are cohesive - due to the fact that team members are very unified in their day-to-day work process, they do not need a leader to monitor them. In some cases leader might even have a negative effect on this type of teams, since they perfectly are self-sufficient and someone's constant control might disturb or frustrate them.
Another case where leadership is not needed is when structured management approach is in place in formal organisations. Those units are usually themselves have a strong controlling power, so leadership would be inadequate.
In case of team which is distributive, leadership will be completely ineffective due to geographical barriers. It is difficult to run something or control someone via e-mail, therefore, due to lack of communication, it is better to avoid leadership.
DQ9
ReplyDeleteEffective communication is crucial in every organization.
Communication barriers are the obstacles to communicate freely and openly via a clear message from sender to receiver. Those obstacles might occur for the number of reasons, most common of them are:
- Filtering: manipulation of information by the sender who makes it look as more favourable and often changes the message so the receiver gets what he wants to hear
- Selective perception: interpretation or perception of the message received is linked to receiver’s background, interests, attitudes
- Information overload: when too much information is received, receiver can no longer process it correctly, so the overload occurs
- Emotions: all the humans have mood switches due to certain life events. If the receiver is worried, stressed, sad or angry, message’s content will be affected and interpretation of the message will be wrong
- Language barrier: especially in case when people do not share the same language as their native, different words may be interpreted differently
- Anxiety and shyness: closed individuals experience lots of tension when communicating, therefore, communication becomes difficult between both sender and receiver
DQ10
Although leadership is very important in every organization, there are some cases when it does not serve as the best method of managing employees. This completely depends on organizational structure, employees and their tasks.
When employees are self-driven and have a major expertise in what they are doing, excessive leadership might play a more negative rather than positive role. Same applies for cohesive teams which are very united in their goals and can analyze themselves. Sometimes tasks do not need to be supervised since they give sufficient self-feedback according to the actions of workers.
Excessive leadership at a long-distance is useless because of geographical differences. In these cases leadership is conducted via phone or e-mail which never can give a sufficient feedback on how the employee is performing. Senders and receivers of the message skip the process of non-verbal communication and might misinterpret each other.
Some jobs such as painting, construction or writing do not necessarily need leadership since it might just annoy the worker. Those professions are based on talents and passion, therefore, excessive leadership just disturbs from achieving goals.
Very good. Effective communication enhance the effectiveness of team work and reduce conflicts between team members, between management and staff, between the organisation and clients.
ReplyDelete