Page 175 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

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Pedagogy and Communication | 163

Factors Influencing Effective Communication in Supportive Interactions
As we have seen, providing emotional support through effective communi-
cation is a challenging task because effective behavioural strategie, pursue
multiple goals and service multiple rhetorical demands, e.g., signalling, intent,
attending to face concerns, incorporating appropriate information, exhibit-
ing person centredness). Thus, highly effective communication for providing
support requires complex and sophisticated behavioural structures as well as
considerable skills including the ability to retrieve relevant knowledge from
memory (of persons, situations, and message options). They acquire new infor-
mation with existing knowledge and integrate new information with existing
knowledge so as to generate optimal and appropriate messages. Supportive
communication, thus, requires behavioural skills.
In addition to having sophisticated behavioural skills, a considerable
amount of effort too is required. Hence, the pedagogue must possess the
motivation to initiate and pursue what may prove to be a challenging task.
Further, the motivation to provide support can be affected by a host of
situational factors such a competence, skills, and motivation factors. The
competence, skill, and motivation involved in an effective supportive com-
munication can be summarized step-wise as follows:
1. Interpretation: Defining the situation; making attributions about the
causes of others’ actions; inferring others’ internal states; and deter-
mining relevant situational roles and rules.
2. Goal generation: Forming intentions pertaining to primary and
secondary instrumental objectives; and forming intentions pertaining
to relational and identity objectives.
3. Planning or action assembly: Building ‘behavioural programmes’ or
cognitive representations of action lines.
4. Enactment: Executing behavioural plans or output representations.
5. Monitoring: Observing and evaluating the outcome of one’s
behaviour—a directed form of interpretation, the result of which may
lead to
6. Reincoding: Recycling processes 2 through 5 in light of the moni-
tored outcome.
This analysis of message production processes needs to be supplemented
by a parallel analysis specifying the cognitive and affective structures that
are generated by one set of processes and subsequently execute another set
of processes. Specifically, interpretation proceeds through the application
of cognitive schemata or constructs the activation and operation which are
influenced by features of the current situation as well as enduring interpretive

Bhatnagar_Chapter 07.indd 163 2011-06-23 7:57:12 PM
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