Business Communication Management

The Key to Emotional Intelligence

Dr. Anna Rostomyan

• Publisher: tredition
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783347208438
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Engineering General
• Index: Technology & Engineering

In diesem Buch geht es um Geschäftskommunikationsmanagement, das durch emotionale Intelligenz und Emotionsmanagement erheblich verbessert werden kann, um erfolgreiche Beziehungen zu stärken.

Section Two

Passion and Reason

1.4. The Role of Emotions in Business Management

Largely speaking, Business Communication is generally goal-oriented; it aims at establishing peaceful relations with the colleagues and transmitting and receiving information. Business environment, indeed, increasingly grows very complex where human resources become the only sustainable source of competitive advantage for any Management. In terms of today’s capitalized and globalized world, it has become the challenge of each and every manager and entrepreneur to increase the turnover and motivation for the qualitative employees to stay and work the best way they can for their companies’ targets. All these cannot be performed unless the manager is well aware of his/her employees’ abilities, potential, needs and expectancies. Still, there is also a great factor that should by all means be taken into consideration, namely emotions. Being a motivator, a leader, a listener, a moderator and a presenter, the manager should at the same time take the role of a psychologist processing the information on his employees’ emotions, feelings, beliefs and desires, which will eventually ensure a better understanding of their own selves and will guarantee preservation of interpersonal good and stable relations, which in their turn will eventually ensure better results and larger labour output in your business.

A professional manager should by all means be able to communicate amicably with the employees so that they, first of all, feel positive disposition towards them, unless there is no proper reason to spoil their harmonious relations. Actually, it is generally known that communication and discussion mainly rely on the interpretive power of the speakers; this is the reason why a large portion of information is being conveyed through speech implicitly – without saying it openly. Leadership, in particular, is necessarily linked with the ability of interpretation and processing of information. In fact, in the process of communication far too much is based on the emotional level, i.e. the positive or negative emotions of the speakers and their emotional background knowledge which, as a matter of fact, can frame resultant positive or negative disposition between the interactants. To understand the most vital issues connected with the personnel communicative relations we first of all need to penetrate into the interesting, as well as challenging field of emotional speech which can be carried out only after having a precise and accurate understanding of what communication generally and emotional background knowledge in particular are, viewing the problem at hand both from the local and the cross-cultural angles (Rostomyan, 2012).

Communication actually is mainly being treated as a process, which is largely based on the mental world of the speakers and embraces a great deal of conscious and subconscious framework. Models to describe this are familiar in linguistics as models of speech acts as Schulz von Thun describes it with his suggestion of four sides of a message. He proposed the communication model called a “four-side model” which is also known as “communication square” or “four-ears model”. According to this model every piece of information includes four messages. The four sides of the information are fact, self-revealing, relationship, and appeal (Friedemann Schulz von Thun, 1981). The communication square describes the multi-layered structure of human utterance. It combines the postulate (second axiom) of Paul Watzlawick (Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J. H., Jackson, D. D., 1969) which implies that every communication has content and relationship aspect, with the three sides of the Organon model proposed by Karl Bühler, according to which every piece of information contains something about the matter, the sender and the receiver (Bühler, 1999).

Discourse analysts hold that the mental, social and physical realities “get ‘activated’ by the utterer and the interpreter in their respective choice-making practices, and that is how they become part of language use as elements with which the making of choices is interadaptable.” (Verschueren, 1999: 88). It is of common ground that in the process of communication we do not always communicate with each other in an explicit manner and very often a lot of things are mutually understood by the speakers without saying them openly (Searle, 1975; Levinson 1983; Friedemann Schulz von Thun, Johannes Ruppel et alia, 2000/2003).

Interpersonal communication, in fact, is not only based on conveying, receiving, and processing information, but also expressing our internal feelings and emotions. Actually, emotions can be communicated through verbal and non-verbal means of communication, i.e. facial expressions, gross bodily movements, gestures, etc. As for the verbalization of emotions in the process of communication, there exist certain function words called intensifiers, such as very, pretty, awfully, immensely, tremendously, etc., which are used to modify or intensify the whole sentence or only part of it and, particularly, the emotional content.

It should be mentioned that when experiencing this or that emotion, people often tend to display that very emotion in an exaggerated manner, more strongly than they actually feel it so that to achieve their desired effect on the interlocutor. On the other hand, there are also some cases when they try to hide the experienced emotion in order to give an impression that the emotion is felt less strongly than it is in reality, or just by making their speech less firm, leave some space for doubt. These are considered to be two opposite emotion management techniques: intensification and de-intensification; which will be minutely discussed in the present book. We shall examine both the maximizing and minimizing means of the categoricity of the statement. This strategy will enable us to have a clear-cut idea of either pole. Thus, focusing on intensifiers giving emotive force to certain parts of the sentence, we shall try to find the most common intensifiers which truly reflect emotions expressed in everyday speech and group them according to their nature and to the part of the sentence they are attached to.

It is generally believed that emotion plays the role we expect, i. e. to communicate information about our internal states, feelings, beliefs, desires. However, in some circumstances, emotions are not demonstrated explicitly in speech. Nonetheless, when undergoing very strong emotions, the speakers are not able to control the display of the felt emotion or to try to minimize the degree of it, and consequently, the experienced emotions are manifested in speech with the help of verbal and non-verbal signs. Moreover, sometimes people tend to display this or that emotion in a more exaggerated manner to have their desired emotional impact on the interlocutors. Besides, there are some cases when they try to hide or reduce the degree of intensity of the experienced emotion to give an impression that the emotion is felt less strongly than it is in reality, or just by making their speech less firm, leave some space for further speculations. In fact, it is notable that in everyday life individuals sometimes do intensify or suppress the expression of emotions for certain self-presentational goals.

The linguistic expression of emotions has to do with pragmalinguistic approach to language phenomena, since albeit emotions may be expressed in gross bodily movements and facial expressions; one’s emotional state is basically expressed in speech. It is also noteworthy that emotions not only reflect the speaker’s emotional state, but also his/her intention, communicative goal, which naturally deals with the perlocutionary level of the speech act. Of course, there are instances of honest communication in which people make no effort to control the emotional messages they send; however, in everyday communication we often witness people trying to use different means of modifying the appearance and expression of their emotional experience.

To finalize, much has been said so far about aspects of implicit meaning in Pragmatics by many outstanding linguists, such as Searle, Grice, Yule, Levinson, Verschueren, van Dijk and many others. Research carried out in this field of analysis comes to prove that speakers usually exercise their interpretative power to decode the illocutionary force of the speech act, to guess the implicature hidden in the message, to grasp the effect of irony or sarcasm in speech, to recognize the clichéd behavioural frames and practice the scenarios stored in the long-term memory in order to decode the strategic involvement of the particular speech event, and so on. Undoubtedly, the role of background emotional memory in the process of communicative interaction is of utmost importance. In fact, a skilled manager should be aware of the role of emotional background knowledge between the interactants and should seek for ways to implement emotion management techniques to avoid communicative conflict between the employer and the employees.

2.2. The Urgency of Emotion Expression Management

As we have given stated, our human communication not only consists in coding and decoding information, but also conveying our inner states, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, wishes and desires, which all in all are usually encoded through verbal and non-verbal means of communication. Everyday life actually progresses in the form of regular interactions with our potential social partners – relatives, friends, colleagues whom we encounter on various social occasions. Our human nature incorporates a great variety of factors which altogether shape our behaviour, and emotions also greatly partake in the formation of the general framework of the communicative context. No doubt the ability to converse, to share our thoughts and feelings with other members of the public has been originally encoded in such a way that speakers should have a positive predisposition to their social co-partners, however depending on various factors, subjective or objective, people sometimes spoil their harmonious relations, which very often occurs because of speech conflicts.

Communication, in general, is subconsciously inclined towards mutual understanding and respect. It normally aims at building a cohesive, unified, tolerant society and establishing peaceful relations with the members of the given speech community. Thus, speakers should usually have an innate predisposition to communicate amicably, unless there is some reason for them to ruin up their harmonious public relations by arguing, disputing, debating and quarrelling with each other. As a matter of fact, whenever we are emotionally upset, we are very often more inclined to misinterpret the decoded messages, attaching extra negative emotive emphasis to them; on the contrary, positive emotions usually lead us into positive evaluations, sympathetic disposition and mutual understanding (Paronyan, Rostomyan, 2011b: 7-14).

Undoubtedly, the exceptional importance of emotions in human life has already been a crucial subject matter both in linguistics and in some social sciences (such as neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, pragmalinguistics, sociology, sociolinguistics, social psychology, etc.). The analyses of verbal behaviour, which proceeds in the form of negative emotional colouring and results in conflict talk, illustrate the major role of the emotional mind (the speakers’ diverse emotions and feelings, thoughts, beliefs, desires and wishes, motivations and intentions) in shaping the communicative context. No doubt, the involvement of the negative emotional attitude of the interlocutors in the process of communication, particularly in the realm of personnel relations, becomes evident in terms of production and interpretation of speech, which actually negatively affects the overall labour output and causes consequential tense relations between the interactants.

As we can see, the field of emotions itself is very complex, fascinating, as well as quite challenging when one tries to reveal the nature of human emotiveness, to penetrate into the inner world of the speakers and to examine how this or that very emotion is manifested in linguistic behaviour. As a matter of fact, being humans, we always experience some sort of emotion or feeling. Moreover, our emotional state varies throughout the day depending on the external stimuli that we perceive. Truly, interpersonal communication is highly influenced by the interlocutors’ inner world, their feelings and emotions, beliefs and desires, as well as positive or negative predisposition towards each other (Paronyan, Rostomyan, 2011b; Rostomyan, 2012).

It is also noteworthy that while communicating with each other we are always restricted by diverse predefined display rules set by this or that society, which are referred to as guidelines for when, where and how to appropriately manage the display of an emotion and which may naturally vary across cultures (Rostomyan, 2013a,b). As a matter of fact, display rules are learnt so early in life that they become habitual later on. They provide people with expectations about how others should act and react so that social interaction...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Section One: Communication and Emotions
• Section Two: Passion and Reason
• Conclusion
• Bibliography