Busn20017 Effective Business Communication | Assessment Answers

The purpose of this assessment is to provide students with the opportunity to engage in reflective practice, using a range of diagnostic tools and feedback, to identify two key areas of personal capability that can be addressed (improved) to increase their communication effectiveness. This assessment is aimed to assess your ability to demonstrate advanced knowledge in written communication and your skill to autonomously reflect about good practices in workplace

 

This assignment has three specific components.

 

1.Diagnosis and Reflection. 

 

a) Using 5 diagnostic tools related to communication, you are to analyse your own communication style across various areas such as verbal communication, active listening, non- verbal, and assertiveness perception. You will be given the individual diagnostics during the tutorials. Your tutor/lecturer will check and sign-off that you have completed each individual diagnostic during the tutorials. This means that if you fail to attend some or any of tutorial you will not be able to receive and complete the diagnostics. The signed diagnostics must be submitted as a separate PDF file.

 

b) You are to present the findings of the tools. The scores for each diagnostic must be included in your essay. In doing so you will show your understanding of the results as they apply to your personal situation.

c) Based upon your analysis of the findings you are to identify two key communication issues that you have identified as requiring development.  communication. Through the process of self-reflection, you will be able to improve your communication competencies through your knowledge of and ability to perform contextually appropriate communicative behaviours.

Answer:

Communication is considered as the vital aspect of organizing and satisfying the professional working life. This is a self-reflection essay which analyzes my weaknesses and shortfalls which I have found individually in my communication skills. I would be taking the use of five diagnostic tools from which I came across at the time of undertaking the course. These tools would be very helpful for me to increase my communication skills that will help me to grow in my personal level. After identifying my weaknesses with the help of diagnostic tools, I would do review literature for analysing the theories linked with my weaknesses and the possible outcomes for it. The Gantt chart will be made to explain the activities which I have to consider in coming six months, for developing upon the skills which I lack.

I have utilized diverse kinds of diagnostic tools to analyze my communication in which first tool was a Self-Perceived Communication Competence Questionnaire which defines that how people analyze their own communication competencies. Along with that this tool evaluates ability of the communication which an individual has at the time of facing various states of affairs. PRICA is another tool that is used by me which stands for Personal Report of Intercultural Communication Apprehension which a person feels at the time of communicating with different kinds of background people. The third tool which I used for the aim of this essay was the NIS-S, it refers for Nonverbal Immediacy Scale-Self Report. This tool facilitates me to evaluate the nearness of a person when they have to converse with other particularly using the nonverbal instant behavior and also represents the effectiveness of a person by using non verbal gestures (Voinea, Busu, Opran & Vladutescu, 2015). The fourth tool was the Tolerance for Disagreement that gives knowledge that how well people can endure disagreement and issuing ideas which one trusts to be true. Lastly, the fifth tool was a talkaholic scale which is considered as a measure compulsive communication. It shows the magnitude of how much a person talks along with that it denotes the level of talkativeness in a person.

I completed my scoring on the questions asked on the five diagnostic tools; I executed to analyze my scores according to the standards and what each of my scores represented, predominantly with regards to my weaknesses. In this relation, initially, I went forward and filled the SPCC and then deliberated my final score in it, which stood at 67.91, rounding up to 68. It shows my average skills of communication in public. After breaking down the scores individually, I got 65 in public, 60 in the meeting, 76.66 in group70 in dyad, 50 in stranger 81.25 or 82 in acquaintances and 72.5 in friend. It represents that I got average score in SPCC in which the major aspect is talking with strangers which could be improved by taking appropriate action.

Most of the time, I do face difficulties in presenting myself in front of the strangers. The next tool which I took in use was PRICA. I would score badly in this section which was 32. It represents that I need to be more comfortable at the time of interacting with people from various cultural backgrounds. The third diagnostic tool I took in use of Talkaholic communication tool where I got 29. It represents that I do not talk too much and considered as a compulsive talker. It helps me to maintain my image in front of people as I do not require stopping myself from talking too much. The next tool I used was Tolerance for Disagreement which was high, it was 55. At last, I used Nonverbal Immediacy Scale Self Report (NIS-S) in which I got 88 that is good score. It represents that I do utilize body language and non-verbal cues to keep my point of view in front of people.

It has been found myself that there are two weaknesses of mine related to the communication apprehensions, which regarding the intercultural apprehensions and stranger speaking apprehensions. There is a number of examples where I have faced the issues in relation to the communication. I got 3-4 months back, I was asked to ready a presentation which should be presented to me in front of number of people. At that time, I faced difficulty in interacting with group as I did not know the other people. I faced difficulty at the time of communicating with strangers. I was asked to speak 200 words and i found that I was unable to speak due to less confidence in talking with stranger. Along with that there is another incident happened when my father asked me to join the theatre show, and I was not ready to play or coordinate with strangers because of I did not know how to talk others. It was positive initiation done by my father to open up my hesitations in front of strangers but I was fail to speak up with strangers.  

There is another example of communication issues regarding the intercultural issues in which I faced the issues while communicating with a person who belongs to different cultures. I was good in the technical knowledge and my manager preferred me to guive training. After giving training he told me to explain the procedure of this software to the new employee who comes from different culture and background. I conducted the meeting in which the employee involved from a different culture with a different point of view in which some of them were bold and other were less talkative. New employees asked me number of questions regarding the new software and tried to talk but due to less interest of mine in talking with strangers, I ignored them which put bad image of mine in front of them.  Along with that I was stuck to give a response to the employee because of the way of speaking and the perception that people were quite different. Personal communication development can be done by removing those communication issues (Ghobadi & Mathiassen, 2016).

It has been found that communication apprehensions are recognized in intercultural communication as well as in public speaking (Russ, 2013). The communication apprehension was introduced by James C McCroskey and he initiated the model of an intercultural communication apprehension. The linguistic barriers and barriers of culture are in the field in this model which was similar to that of thoughts and emotions in the communication apprehensions (Wang, 2008). It has been found by some Scholars that the presence of an anxiety exists in some specific situation such as a public speaking situation or job interview. There are some authors that have highlighted that intercultural communication apprehensions were according to the negative perceptions in relation to the variety of cultures of two people (Grunig, 2013). This reflected an uneasy behavior when an individual came in contact that belongs to a different culture. It is done because due to less knowledge about the culture of different people and their behavior towards the thing. Different perception and ideas about one specific thing can make the concern of intercultural communication barriers (Neuliep, 2014).

Rahmani (2017), was introduced the meaning of intergroup anxiety in the form of negative feeling, as well as a feeling of restlessness when the person has come across to communicate with another person who is belonging to different cultural identity. In such case, the result of intergroup anxiety portrays reflects in a negative form which outcome in the cognitive performance of a person being hindered (Merkin, 2009). It has been found that there are expanded contextual incompatibilities in the relation of communication apprehensions outcome from the dissimilarity in and culture of the individual. For instance, individuals who are belonging to us, transformer Arabic Nations and Western Europe put a focus on their personal activities, personal space, and needs.

According to Hsu, (2007), communication has a significant role in a team and Group building and it is necessary for the organization to get growth to keep the focus on developing the communication within the organization to improve the coordination. It has been found that there are two issues of communication skills such as lack of communication in intercultural and difficulties in talking with strangers. It has been found that there is a number of models of communication which is facilitated to decrease the issues of communication at the time of interacting with a group of people (Jin, Liu & Austin, 2014). There is an example of transaction model that elaborate the belief of communication that does not flow back. It builds a situation where a person does not require thinking to respond to a situation or phenomenon.

It has been found that personal and professional lives dealing with a lot of problems, and one of the most severe of these is difficulty in speaking in public. According to Law, Buhalis & Cobanoglu, (2014), a majority of people are facing this challenge especially when someone is asked to engage or to speak out to a large number of people.  As per him almost everyone on this planet has this issue of being anxious while facing a large number of people , though the level of anxiety may vary from person to person depending on their own personality traits such as level of confidence, how they were brought up, the level of education they received, even the vocabulary which they possess plays a major role in affecting the situation.  This challenge is very much evident especially in college students who faced this issue while they were asked to address their own mates or college fellows. According to a research done by Jaffe, (2015), even simple activities like understanding and making difference between different sounds and to try to understand simple words become a challenge and the situations alter quite dramatically (Reim, Parida & Örtqvist, 2015). It is a well-known fact by everyone the communications skills play a very major role in defining our success and respect in our college and work life, a person who can speak really well is expected to be a good leader and might achieve great heights of success real quick, because if affects the life in several ways , for example by making you more efficient in discussing your issues and getting a solution to it , motivating your team mates in order to get a better output, or being able to justify why one was not able to complete his/her work on the given timeline and is able to make negotiations.  This is just a few examples of how big a difference can this important skill create. It is very easy to understand that why most of the successful people from Barack Obama to Sundar Pichai are amazing orators.

According to Mak, Brown & Wadey, (2013), the feeling of anxiety which originates from the activity of speaking with a stranger can be divided into two parts. The first one being the psychological effects which are very easy to sight once a person starts speaking in public such as sweating on forehead and palm, people start to stammer while they speak and start forgetting words as if they never knew those words and become super conscious of how they are appearing while they are addressing people, a very high and steep increase is observed in the heartbeat of the person while might even reach alarming levels in some cases. Weakness in knees is observed, which happens because of adrenaline rush which we face, which is only released when our brains anticipate a dangerous situation which makes it very clear that how strangely our brain takes on these situations.  Secondly, what makes the situation more severe is the advent of negative thoughts in the brain while we are speaking in public which is absolutely irrelevant to the situation which we are facing at that point in time. According to Moon, Parker, Croft & Van der Loos, (2013), people start showing signs of absolute discomfort and heavy precipitation which does not help the individual in easing the situation anyways.
 A lot of research has been done on this topic and people like Manning, Waldman, Lindsey, Newberg & Cotter-Lockard, (2013), have tried to accurately identify how to help the individual in such situations, according to him, people going through these situations should try to absorb from their past experiences and should not stop going into public speeches to adapt their brain to such situations which will eventually start taking such situations as normal ones , because once your subconscious brain understands that this is absolutely normal, it is able to eradicate high anxiety levels, and it keeps on learning which eventually becomes a very casual activity for our brain (Monteiro de Carvalho, 2013). Parents should incline their children from a very early age towards being able to speak in public and this can be made very easy such pushing and motivating them a little for Poem recitals, or encouraging them to take part in free speeches, article speaking and debates which will help them amazingly when they grow up as they will show zero signs of anxiety. The individuals will be able to learn better about their attitude and they will be able to change their own perceptions about their personality. Communication skills play a very important role in defining the level of success of a person, be it a student, a professional or an entrepreneur (Wirtz, Pistoia, Ullrich & Göttel, 2016). We can take an example from the famous book Julius Ceaser where Antonio was able to alter the thinking of Romans simply with help of his powerful language and public speaking skills or how Adolf Hitler was able to gain the support of his public with the help of his strong skills of Public speaking. The complete history itself is a proof of the astonishing power which the human tongue possesses.
Issues in speaking can also be viewed getting escalated when people are asked to deal with people from different cultural backgrounds (Nickolayev, Svintorzhitskaja, Bondar & Ermakova, 2015).  So by reading so much from history, I could easily figure out that the only way to eliminate these issues is by facing it head-on, running away would only make the situations worse and difficult to face. I would start following an action plan strictly for the next months to make things easier for me. I would start maintaining a journal to pin down events where I faced challenges and where did I perform really well in day to day life. I would Pen down every detail of the day to figure out my positives and negatives to make it more sorted for me to plan further. I am going to attend an intercultural fest being help in June 2018 in our own community to promote a beautiful and multicultural Australia. My mentor who also happens to be my tutor will be helping me for the first three months and will be guiding me on how to improve more on the same for which he will keep on sharing suggestions and will help me identify more deeply. I feel really blessed as our University has people from several different cultural backgrounds with whom I can interact as much as I can which I will be doing as a part of extra activities during the holidays. I would also start to read a lot of literature which will help me learn and stay motivated, also learning from which will be applied later on while I would be interacting with people from different cultural backgrounds.

I would start to understand the behaviour of the people from different religious through books and articles which will make it more acceptable towards a high level of diversity and to absorb the different perspectives people have for life, also talking to people there as much as I can to open up more. I would also join the theater classes again which my father had suggested me to do, I would do that for three months which will help me eliminate the fear of stage and public (Marinho, Mesquita de Medeiros, Gama & Teixeira, 2017). After exceeding the timeline which I have decided myself I would be gauging my success depending on the feedback from my Tutor, university students and classmates and of course my father as he understands the situations I am going through.

After recognizing that to communicate leading development, plan for the next 6 months to reduce the gap in my communication skills not even in my personal life as well as professional. Initially, keeping a personal journal would be advantageous in the entire process to keep me on track to identify that what I have done to increase my personal growth. At the end of the six months, it would be very useful for me to identify the zone where I have developed my skills to overcome my issues and if there are issues, I need to work on, it would act as a future framework that facilitates me to create a proper guidelines regarding my activities. In the next step of an action plan, having a mentor improve my anxiety issues and help me to learn confidence in presenting, diagnosis effectively. My anxiety issues, I am going to hire Druck zona who has 20 years of experience in reducing the communication barriers from various people. There is a training program which conducted by him, I would participate to his training program and attend the advice on how to develop my communication skills while presenting myself in front of people who are belonging from different culture or background. It would be helpful to me in increasing my confidence and reduce communication apprehension.

Gantt Chart showing Action Plan
	Jun-18	Jul-18	Aug-18	Sep-18	Oct-18	Nov-18
Reading Journal articles
Join theatre class
Discussing with Mentor (Druck Zona)
going on crowd
Participating in Cultural Fest
Weekly communication with strangers

Hence, this activity would be helpful for me to improve my communication skills in an appropriate manner. Optimistically, this action plan will be able to succeed in my endeavors

In the limelight of above discussion, it can be concluded that the essay gave a brief insight into the five kinds of diagnostic tools I used to gather the information regarding my communication issues. I have found with the help of these tools that there are two communication issues in my skills such as stranger speaking anxiety and the intercultural communication issue. These two theories are related to the communication apprehension and intergroup anxiety. The literature review section has been described the importance of communication and how an individual overcome his communication issues by applying theories. At last the action plan has been made to define the taken action by the person in an efficient manner.

References

Ghobadi, S., & Mathiassen, L. (2016). Perceived barriers to effective knowledge sharing in agile software teams. Information Systems Journal, 26(2), 95-125.

Grunig, J. E. (2013). Excellence in public relations and communication management. Routledge.

Hsu, C. F (2007). A cross-cultural comparison of communication orientations between Americans and Taiwanese. Communication Quarterly, 55, 359– 374.

Jaffe, C. (2015). Public Speaking: Concepts and Skills for a Diverse Society (8^th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

Jin, Y., Liu, B. F., & Austin, L. L. (2014). Examining the role of social media in effective crisis management: The effects of crisis origin, information form, and source on publics’ crisis responses. Communication research, 41(1), 74-94.

Law, R., Buhalis, D., & Cobanoglu, C. (2014). Progress on information and communication technologies in hospitality and tourism. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 26(5), 727-750.

Mak, A. S., Brown, P. M., & Wadey, D. (2013). Contact and attitude toward international students in Australia: Intergroup anxiety and intercultural communication emotions as mediators. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 45, 491.

Manning, C. A., Waldman, M. R., Lindsey, W. E., Newberg, A. B., & Cotter-Lockard, D. (2013). Personal Inner Values–A Key to Effective Face-to-Face Business Communication. Journal of Executive Education, 11(1), 3.

Marinho, A. C. F, Mesquita de Medeiros, A., Gama A. C. C, & Teixeira, L. C. (2017). Fear of public speaking: perception of college students and correlates. Journal of Voice, 31(1), 127.e7–127.e11. doi: 10.1016/j.jvoice.2015.12.012

Merkin, R. S. (2009). Cross-Cultural differences in approach-avoidance communication in South Korea and the US. Human Communication, 12, 199-213.

Monteiro de Carvalho, M. (2013). An investigation of the role of communication in IT projects. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 34(1), 36-64.

Moon, A., Parker, C. A., Croft, E. A., & Van der Loos, H. M. (2013). Design and impact of hesitation gestures during human-robot resource conflicts. Journal of Human-Robot Interaction, 2(3), 18-40.

Neuliep, J. W. (2014). Intercultural communication: A Contextual Approach (6^th ed.). Sage Publications.

Nickolayev, V. P., Svintorzhitskaja, I. A., Bondar, I. A., & Ermakova, L. I. (2015). On subtle distinctions between lingual communication and interlingual miscommunication. European Journal of Science and Theology, 11(4), 159-168.

Rahmani, D. (2017). Apprehension and Anxiety in Communication. DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.414

Reim, W., Parida, V., & Örtqvist, D. (2015). Product–Service Systems (PSS) business models and tactics–a systematic literature review. Journal of Cleaner Production, 97, 61-75.

Russ, T. L. (2013). The Influence of Communication Apprehension on Superiors' Propensity for and Practice of Participative Decision Making. Communication Quarterly, 61(3), 335- 348. doi: 10.1080/01463373.2013.776989

Voinea, D. V., Busu, O. V., Opran, E. R., & Vladutescu, S. (2015). Embarrassments in managerial communication. Polish Journal of Management Studies, 11(2).

Wang, S.K., (2008). The effects of a synchronous communication tool (yahoo messenger) on online learners’ sense of community and their multimedia authoring skills. Journal of Interactive Online Learning, 7(1), pp.59-74.

Wirtz, B. W., Pistoia, A., Ullrich, S., & Göttel, V. (2016). Business models: Origin, development and future research perspectives. Long Range Planning, 49(1), 36-54.