Chapter Outline
I. What is Communication: Creating a message meaning within a person and exchanging meaning between people.
II. Skills for 21st-Century Business: Twenty-first-century business communicators need multiple communication skills.
a. Interpersonal or internal communication: Involves the internal processing of messages; what goes on inside an individual’s head while he or she thinks. It is also what happens before he or she externalizes a concept. It is the ideas, thoughts, knowledge, and opinions that we think about or sift through before we choose which words we believe will best suit our needs when communicating with others. The intrapersonal skills that are most important to business are listening, which is the process of internalizing an external oral message and using it to fuel new ideas (see Chapter 4), and reading, which is the process of internalizing an external written message for the same purpose.
b. Business communication: Involves the design and exchange of messages between and among members to accomplish organizational goals.
c. Interpersonal or external communication: The interaction between at least two people who co-create a relationship. Interpersonal communication is the external expression of the ideas, thoughts, knowledge, and opinions from one mind to one or many others. The delivery and reception of these messages is complex, including simultaneous use by all parties of intrapersonal, verbal (spoken or written, depending on the situation), nonverbal (gesture or visual presentation), and listening skills. Interpersonal communication is the basis for all business interactions.
d. Small-group communication: Involves two or more people who join together to accomplish specific goals. Small-group communication involves interactions between two or more people working together to accomplish tasks. Successful small-group communication requires participation, cooperation, and collaboration among all members of the group (Chapter 13). Small groups may be subject to conflict, which can often result in stronger task resolutions (Chapter 14).
e. Verbal communication: The use of both spoken and written language to accomplish message goals.
f. Non-verbal communication: Non-verbal communication consists of messages delivered without speaking; smiling, fidgeting, stretching, or watching attentively. Non-verbal communications may or may not be intentional, but it is important in business situations to be aware of these communications because they influence the relationships we form and develop with our audience.
g. Public communication: Public speaking or lectures presented to a group audience. Public communication is the delivery of a message to a group audience. Individuals make public communications to audiences within an organization as well as to audiences outside of the organization. They include oral reports, presentations, and sales messages (Chapter Seven).
III. Basic Communication Principles
a. Communication is a process: The process of communication is a moving and evolving set of experiences that influence our present and future interactions.
b. Communication is contextual: Our interactions with others occur during specific social situations, in different physical environments, and for a variety of purposes.
c. Communication is continuous: From the moment we are born, we are always communicating, even if we do not talk, we still communicate nonverbally (includes body movements such as gestures, facial expressions, and vocal sounds that do not use words) .
d. Communication coordinates our relationships: Our relationships with other people are coordinated, negotiated, and maintained through communication.
e. Communication is symbolic: A symbol is a type of sign that has no natural connection to the idea, word, or object it represents.
f. Communication is culturally linked: Culture is a socially constructed way of thinking and behaving in the world. Intercultural communication focuses on the interactions between people from different cultural groups.
g. Communication is collaborative: When people work together to accomplish a business goal, they are collaborating. While collaborators may have different perspectives, attitudes, skills, and cultural values, they come together to solve problems, make decisions, and work toward the achievement of business goals.
h. Communication is ethical: To be ethical, business communication must be trustworthy and in the audience’s best interest. Business ethics involves a system of principles that guide the proper conduct of companies and individuals.
IV. How Does Communication Work? Illustrated in Figure 1.4. The primary goal of communication is to achieve mutual understanding of message meanings. When mutual understanding occurs, we achieve high fidelity (the achievement of mutual understanding), which is the ideal communication experience.
a. Is high fidelity hard to achieve? Noise (any interference that interrupts or affects the exchange of messages) can make high fidelity hard to achieve and it is the primary reason for communication breakdowns.
i. Internal noise: Can be any psychological or physiological interruption that makes the message difficult to design, receive, or interpret.
ii. External noise: Any environmental interference – such as loud sounds, strong odors, extreme temperatures, or even lighting conditions – that affects the exchange of messages.
iii. Message-based noise: Refers to design flaws or differences in meaning that can distort or confuse messages.
b. Components of the communication process:
i. Ideas: Generated at the point of perception, when information from the environment or from inside your mind stimulates and arouses your attention.
ii. Communication source and receiver: Each person in the communication process is both a message source (the originator and transmitter of the message) and a receiver (the recipient of the message, or the destination point) throughout a given interaction.
iii. Messages: Ideas encoded and designed into one or more symbols to communicate meaning.
iv. Communication channels: A medium that carries messages within and between people.
1. Human channels: Include thoughts, verbal communication, nonverbal behaviors, sound, sight, and smell.
2. Technological channels: Include radio, TV, telephone, fax, video, e-mail, and hand-held devices.
v. Encoding: All messages begin in the mind as an idea. The original idea is an abstract concept that has to be translated into a symbol that can be further developed intrapersonally or shared with others.
vi. Decoding: To perceive, translate, and interpret information received in a message. Selectivity allows us to attach concepts to one another according to our interests and what we already know. We then encode the new information we’ve identified through selectivity with symbols that have personal meaning for us, independent of the meaning they may have in a larger, more public context. The message we send ourselves, then, takes the form of an internal dialogue or a mental image.
vii. Message feedback: A special type of message designed as a response to a received message.
viii. Culture: Culture refers to a social structure that determines how an individual perceives the world. In business, especially in international business interactions, knowledge of the audience’s cultural background can be crucial if we are to design a meaningful and effective message. This is called intercultural communication (Chapter 12).
V. Communicating Intrapersonally: A private interaction within a single person who is the encoder, decoder, and transmitter of messages. From a cognitive perspective, intrapersonal communication is a mental activity that involves transforming symbols and sensations into meaning.
a. Encoding and Decoding Messages Intrapersonally: People receive information externally from their environment and internally from within themselves. Choosing certain information to focus on is called selectivity.
b. The Meaning of Symbols: While some literal meaning may be synonymous with our individual interpretation, we determine meaning based on intrapersonal, interpersonal, contextual, and social factors. Symbols have meanings that depend on a number of factors, including a shared experience, culture, and context. When the audience does not share the same experience, culture, or context as the person delivering the message, the symbol may fail to deliver the meaning that was intended (Chapter Five).
c. Sending Ourselves Messages: The three primary channels used in the transmission of intrapersonal communication are self-talk, mental imagery, and nonverbal behaviors.
VI. The Intrapersonal and Business Communication Connection: In the world of work as in life, the way we have learned to think is central to the way we communicate with others and ourselves. To communicate effectively with other professionals in business, we have to learn how to create clear messages.
a. Designing Business Communication: The construction of a given message is the domain of the communication designer, who skillfully plans and designs effective business messages.
b. What is a Communication Design Strategy? A design strategy offers options and techniques that enable a business communicator to design messages more effectively so they will accomplish communication goals. We rarely think about the intrapersonal process of communication because we do it automatically. The challenge can be effectively communicating the product of that process to others. While we understand the precise meanings we’ve attached to various symbols, others may not. In business, misunderstandings can be disastrous. For this reason, business people must become effective communication designers, designing message meanings that are clearly understood by receivers. Communication designers use a variety of design strategies to simplify this process. Design strategies offer receivers recognizable forms to help them understand the use of symbols in the message.
