Page 132 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

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cognitive processes relating to the storage, recall and integration of social
information. In short, there appears to be a lot more going on beneath the
surface than we might first suspect.

Impression Management
Impression management is the art of looking good. Most of us do our best to
look good to others when we meet them for the first time. The desire to make
a favourable impression on others is a strong one. Social psychologists use
the term, impression management or appropriate self-presentation to describe
this. Research efforts have shown that those who perform impression man-
agement successfully do gain important advantage often in many situations.

Techniques of Impression Management

Individuals use many conscious and unconscious techniques to boost their
image. These are divided into two major categories—self-enhancement, or
efforts to increase ones’ appeal to others and other-enhancement, or efforts
to make the target persons feel good in various ways.
The techniques for self-enhancement include our effort to boost our
physical appearances through style, personal grooming, and the uses of
various props.
Describing oneself in positive term is another technique which is used
by many an individuals. Many people use this technique to increase their
adversely affecting reactions to the persons who use them. Coming to other-
enhancement, we may use many different tactics to induce positive moods
and reactions in others. The most commonly used tactics of other-enhance-
ment is flattering statements that praise the other person, his or her trait or
accomplishments, or the organizations with which the person is associated
with expressing agreement, doing small favours for them. You may probably
recall many instances when you were the target of such strategies. But do
these tactics succeed in generating positive feelings and reactions on the part
of the person towards whom they are directed? The answer is yes, provided,
they are used with skill and care. But if overused or used ineffectively, it can
backfire and produce negative rather than positive reactions from others.
The moral is, while tactics of impression management often succeed, this is
not always the case as sometimes they may turn around as boomerangs.

Impression Management and Communication

The function of identification and identity management is grounded in
an encoder perspective, examining how communication manifests ‘who
they are’ through nonverbal signals. Impression formation is grounded in

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