Communicating in Teams and Organizations – Chapter 9
COMMUNICATION PROCESS MODEL
Four main factors influencing the effectiveness of this encoding-decoding process positively
1. sender and receiver have similar “codebooks”
e.g. because of different language codebooks
dictionaries of symbols, language,
2. experience
gestures, and other tools used to
– sender’s knowledge which words, symbols, voice intonations convey message content
transmit the message more clearly and persuasively to others
3. skills and motivation to use the selected communication channels
e.g. one prefers face-to-face conversation over tweets
4. sender’s and receiver’s shared mental models of the communication context
Communication Channels
Email and other digital message channels
• advantages
− reduction of social and organizational status differences
− reduction of prejudice (age, race, etc. are unknown or less noticeable)
• problems
− poor communication of emotions
people consistently and significantly overestimate the degree to which they
understand the emotional tone of digital messages
− less politeness and respectfulness
digital messages are often less diplomatic than written letters;
senders are more likely to send disparaging messages digitally than by other
communication channels
− cumbersome medium for ambiguous, complex, and novel situations
− contributes to information overload
COMMUNICATION PROCESS MODEL
Four main factors influencing the effectiveness of this encoding-decoding process positively
1. sender and receiver have similar “codebooks”
e.g. because of different language codebooks
dictionaries of symbols, language,
2. experience
gestures, and other tools used to
– sender’s knowledge which words, symbols, voice intonations convey message content
transmit the message more clearly and persuasively to others
3. skills and motivation to use the selected communication channels
e.g. one prefers face-to-face conversation over tweets
4. sender’s and receiver’s shared mental models of the communication context
Communication Channels
Email and other digital message channels
• advantages
− reduction of social and organizational status differences
− reduction of prejudice (age, race, etc. are unknown or less noticeable)
• problems
− poor communication of emotions
people consistently and significantly overestimate the degree to which they
understand the emotional tone of digital messages
− less politeness and respectfulness
digital messages are often less diplomatic than written letters;
senders are more likely to send disparaging messages digitally than by other
communication channels
− cumbersome medium for ambiguous, complex, and novel situations
− contributes to information overload
