Page 12 - Communication in Organizations Basic Skills and Conversation Models

Introduction

Purpose of this book

Organizations are networks of people. These people need to communicate with each
other in order to perform the tasks necessary for the realization of the organizational
goals. One of the problems that students are faced with when preparing for a managerial
task in an organization is the fact that ‘organization’ and ‘communication’ are abstract
concepts. Concepts like these need to be made concrete. What are the subjects in the
communication? Who is involved? What is the purpose of the communication? This book
will be useful for students who are being educated for managerial positions. It will help
them to develop a theoretical framework for various types of conversations and will give
them a guide to learning the skills necessary to hold these conversations in a professional
manner. In many respects this is important in order to realize the goals of the organization
(Baron & Markman, 2000; Margie, Dickson, & Tourish, 2004).

Structure of the book
This book consists of three parts. Part I Basic Communication Skills, discusses the
importance of these skills in almost every professional conversation. These basic skills
can be considered the building blocks for the conversation types discussed in Part II,
Dialogues, and Part III, Group Conversations. In Part I a distinction is made between the
so-called regulating skills, which are skills used to direct the conversation (Chapter 1),
listening skills (Chapter 2) and sender skills (Chapter 3). The basic communication skills
are partly based on Ivey’s microtraining method (Ivey, 1971; Ivey & Bradford Ivey,
2003)—a step-by-step method in which the complexity of the skills taught increases—
and partly from the book Personal Conversations. Roles and Skills for Counsellors
(Lang, Van der Molen, Trower, & Look, 1990).
Part II contains a number of dialogues held by managers in most organizations. The
dialogues discussed are: the interview (Chapter 4), the selection interview (Chapter 5),
the job application interview (Chapter 6), the performance evaluation interview (Chapter
7), the personal problems interview (Chapter 8), handling complaints (Chapter 9), the bad
news interview (Chapter 10) and the sales interview (Chapter 11). In each chapter
attention is paid to the structure of the conversation and to the skills necessary to hold the
conversation in such a way that its goals will be achieved. This part focuses on the
interaction between two conversation partners.
A number of group conversations in which more than two people participate are
discussed in Part III: decision making (Chapter 12), leading meetings (Chapter 13),
conflict management (Chapter 14), negotiating (Chapter 15) and giving presentations
(Chapter 16). The main issue in these chapters is the role of the conversation leader, who
should be able to handle the complexity caused by the different senders and different