Case Study of conflict and negotiation

Identify one of the conflict-handling styles (Accommodating/competing) used in this scenario. How did you determine that? avoiding/competing/

This scenario clearly shows us that there is conflict between Robert and Kay. Robert requests a pay raise for his work unit, while Kay is not willing to provide it and is instead offering to discuss providing them with appealing job opportunities.

However, he is adamant that his team needs to be

compensated with a monetary increase. He went as far as threatening to get the union involved if

his request is unsuccessful.

Robert is using a competing style to deal with the conflict that he has with his manager Kay, because he is threatening to involve the work union if his demands are not met. By involving the work union Kay’s company faces the possibility of legal intervention which makes the company lose. The outcome that Robert is looking for is one where he wins and Kay loses, making this a competing style of conflict management.

Choose one of the characters and determine which bargaining approach(distributive or integrative) is used. How did you determine that?

My choice of character is Robert. Based on his argument, Robert is taking distributive bargaining approach. Looking at the positions and interests of both parties, we see that Robert is looking out for his own interests and not that of Kay’s.

	Robert	Kay
Position	Pay increase	Do not increase pay
Interest	Receive more money	Retain money in the company

Robert is justifying his demands by arguing that his work unit contributed substantially to the company’s growth and hence should be compensated for their years of hard work. In doing so, he is strengthening his position and taking the opposing side of Kay’s interests. Robert is also not considering Kay’s position(he is adamant) which is that the company needs these funds for critical company expansion and diversification plans, because Robert understands that by winning this conflict it will hinder the company’s ability to do so. In conclusion, based on Robert’s position, he is taking a distributive bargaining approach

What aspect of Interpersonal communication is contributing to the poor working environment? How is this demonstrated in this case?

After Robert sends his message to Kay, he flags it. This indicates that he gave very little attention to Robert’s request and his reasons for doing so by just flagging them. Perhaps Robert found this as curt behaviour intended to dismiss him without any intention of considering his demands. Instead of simply flagging his demands, Kay should have had agreed to arrange a meeting to spend more time discussing the matter with Robert and not a meeting about involving his team with more work. Arranging a meeting to listen to his demands would show that she is actively listening to Robert, then Robert might not have acted aggressively through his threats of a lawsuit.

The other poor aspect of interpersonal communication is the way in which the conflict was handled. Robert went straight to making a threat to the company when he received Kay’s response that they were unwilling to meet his demands. Robert is attempting to gain power company by using fear of legal authorities. If Kay decides to meet his display of force with force the outcome will be Robert’s team getting compensated for a few years of work and getting fired immediately after, which is a lose-lose outcome for both parties. The conflict that would take place is Dysfunctional because there is no support for each other’s goals. If Robert had been willing to negotiate with Kay by lowering his demands, for example by reducing his requested raise, Kay might have agreed and both parties would win in this situation.

Using Hall’s context model( high and low context culture), describe one of the character’s behaviour. How did you determine that?

The pretext to this conflict is that “Kay knows the value of Robert’s team and readily acknowledges their achievements”. Kay then extends an invitation to his team to get involved in the new projects. Perhaps what Kay intended to convey by the order of these actions is that she was concerned about his needs but was unable to meet them and is doing everything in her power to meet his interests. She wanted Robert to understand the context of her response because she was trying to convey concern and understanding for his troubles, not that she was dismissive. Kay’s actions are intended to be interpreted in a high context culture.

P. Staff . (2019) Negotiation in Business: Ethics, Bias, and Bargaining in Good Faith. [Available at : https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/business-negotiations/are-you-negotiating-in-good-faith/ (Accessed 29 July 2019).

All about Stereotypes

Stereotypes are formed because humans have a natural tendency to form patterns and theories about other humans to make informed predictions about their behavior. After observing a repeated set of behavior or characteristics by a group of people, we form ideas about the behavior of other people who belong to the same group to make sense of the world we live in. This thought process is what enabled humans to learn from past experiences over many centuries of evolution. Through the process of categorization and discrimination, a person would make judgments based on another person’s characteristics and socioeconomic status before an interaction took place.

Stereotyping can be shallow and unfair, but is in human nature to do so, so I believe we should not dismiss stereotyping as simple bigotry. Humans have been stereotyping each other for millennia and it is a habit deeply engrained in us, so we should try to understand our reasons for doing so.

From as early as the prehistoric stone age(3 million years ago), humans would infer information about other humans such as their status, affiliation and possibility of threat before any interaction took place. In those times it was impossible for any individual person to carry out the necessary tasks for survival in our prehistoric world alone, such as hunting a large Wooly Mammoth or fending off a pack of wolves, so everyone had to work and live together with other cavemen for the sake of their own survival. Community was paramount. Thus tribes were formed because it was necessary for people to work together towards a common goal.

Along with community living came the need to manage social situations. In these social situations, the cognitive ability to distinguish potential threats and allies by stereotyping became a necessary skill to be accepted. This allowed a person to tell if another person would eventually become a potential friend or enemy. By distinguishing a friend from foe, this allowed a person to stay safe and learn about others before interacting with them. This was the most important and oldest reason for stereotyping others.

The answer is simple: for millions of years, status has been vital to the survival and reproductive success of all animals, including our own prehistoric ancestors. (Brett, 2015, p.1)

At the foundation of every stereotype we make, we want to find out if it is a good idea to engage a person or avoid them all together for our own benefit. While today we don’t live under the fear that our fellow caveman might kill us to take our food and land, we still live with the awareness that we would be better off avoiding certain people and getting closer to others. Stereotypes tell us information about a person that helps us make choices about interacting with them.

The downside to stereotyping is that along the way we will have errors in our judgement. What we believe to be true isn’t always true. For example, there is a stereotype that SIM students are less academic students compared to other autonomous universities in Singapore. While this may be true in some cases, there are many students in this university who work hard and consistently attain good grades with average scores in the 80-90 percent range, including many friends I personally know.

When I was overseas on a vacation in another country, I had an encounter where somebody stereotyped that I ate dog meat because I was Chinese, this is false. The person who said this was unaware that his stereotypes about Chinese people, while sometimes true, were in this case false.

In conclusion, we can see that stereotypes were mostly true, there are many times when they are not leading to wrong judgements.

McKay, B. (2015) Men and Status, an Introduction. Available at:  https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/men-and-status-an-introduction/  (Accessed: 30 Dec 2018).

McKay, B. (2015)  Men and Status: How Testosterone Fuels the Drive for Status . Available at:  https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/men-status-the-biological-evolution-of-status/ (Accessed: 30 Dec 2018).

Breuning, L. (2015)  Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels. Adams Media .

My Johari Window exercise in class

Ths Johari Window model was conceived by American psychologists in 1955. It is a straightforward and functional tool for analyzing how you perceive yourself and how others perceive you. It can exemplify and enhance self understanding and mutual understanding between people in a community.

We did an exercise in class where we had to partner up with a classmate, then we used the Johari Window model to do an analysis on each other.

This exercise was done with Andrew. These are my results of my analysis(row A and B) and my partner’s analysis(Row C and D).

The results show a wide difference between what I think of myself and what my partner thinks of me as there are almost no common traits in our analysis. I am inclined to believe that my analysis is more accurate than my partner’s because we just met while I have known myself for a long time. This indicates to me that how I see myself is very different from how others see me.

Based on the Johari Window model, most of my attributes are under the Open area(helpful, kind, modest, mature). There is one attribute which I am unaware about that others know, it is the attribute “Sensible”. While there are no attributes that fall under the unknown area category.

Shannon Weaver model of communication

Discuss if Shannon and Weaver’s (1954) model of
communication complete?

The origin of the Shannon Weaver model of communication is in an article called A Mathematical Theory Of Communication written by the Mathematician Claude Shannon for the publication Bell System Technical Journal. In this article, Shannon described a model of a general communications that explained the process of how information was transmitted and received. Shannon’s intention for creating this model was to improve telephonic communication in engineering through mathematical study of information transmission between machines. It was later expanded on and reapplied to general communication by the scientist Warren Weaver when he realized that the generality of Shannon’s work exceeded the domain it was originally intended for. He continued her work in a book called The Mathematical Theory Of Communication. Their combined work on the same communications model was how it got to be named the Shannon-Weaver model of communication.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Weaver_model

This model is a good tool for breaking down and analyzing the fundamental elements of a communication system. At a rudimentary level a message can be conveyed as long as the elements(Information Source, Transmitter, Channel, Receiver, Destination) are present, if anyone of these elements were removed communication would not be possible. As an example

• Information Source: Brain
• Transmitter(Encoder): Mouth
• Channel: Sound, words spoken in the air
• Receiver(Decoder): Ear of the receiver
• Destination: Brain of the receiver
• Feedback: Reply
• Noise: The noise of an engine running the background

The last element in this model is the Noise Source. This element is received alongside the Transmitter by the receiver and accounts for ambient noise that has the potential to affect the message. In our example, the noise of the engine running in the background may drown out certain words the sender is saying rendering the receiver unable to hear the entire message.

Communication Theory Source

Explanation of the model Source

The Shannon Weaver model makes a good attempt at classifying the components of a communication system because it establishes the basic elements in a communication system and the interaction between them. However it is only useful for a basic understanding of human communication as it lacks important details of each component that ultimately affect the message being delivered. The elements sender and receiver are simple entities with no characteristics. There is no room in the model for other information such as the number of people who make up the elements, the social position of the participants and the psychological state of each party. All these factors are important determinants that affect the type of communication that takes place but are absent in the model. A public speaker would communicate differently than a person having a private conversation on the phone.

The inclusion of a noise source is a good effort on the people who created this model to account for ambient noise. However it is very sparse of details which are just as important to the receiver as the message has to be encoded and decoded again. It would be good if the model had a reverse flow of communication to represent the back and forth process of communication.

The model does not consider the context that communication takes place in. There are factors that make up the context of the system include the environment of the communication, the social-psychological conditions such as the type of society that this is taking place in or how the people are feeling and the time factors which include what era we are talking about and the sequence of events. Context is an important factor which could change the meaning of the message

Summary: Shannon Weaver model manages to encompass some of the principles of communication, however it is not an all-encompassing model of communication theory between humans and has left out a certain number of concepts.

Introduction to my blog

This page is the introduction to my WordPress blog that has been created as part of the assessment for my Business Communications module.

Hi, my name is Jerrold Koh and welcome to my personal blog. I will be uploading all sorts of cool and interesting posts for my lecturer.

I started studying for my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at SIM under the University of Wollongong, Australia in 2018 after completing my GCE A levels in Singapore. I am currently halfway through my three year degree course and decided to study MGNT102 for my elective subject.

I am a reserved person by nature who doesn’t make friends as easily as he would like, but I have some great friends and love meeting new people and talking with others. I generally don’t follow social trends as I a firm believer of self reliance and living your own life without being influenced by others, but in my experience this is not a very practical way of winning over people because you simply have nothing to relate to others over. I believe life should be a balance of being around others by following the crowd and self discovery through spending time alone doing things that make you happy.

Through studying this course I hope to:

• Learn about communication in the business world to improve my career in the future
• Understand human nature at a deeper level
• Improve my relationships with others by developing my social skills
• Practice my letter writing skills
• Learn not to tweet like Donald Trump

One of my favorite quotes about life is from an old tuition teacher and friend. “We should always be able to laugh at ourselves, that includes our achievements and mistakes”

7/5/2019