[speaker001:] [LAUGHTER] I'll explain [LAUGHTER]... [LAUGHTER]... Have you got your notes with you from last week?... What's the last heading we got to? I know we've erm... I shall prevent myself swearing... Basically, the clip's buggered sorry? Well that's that's what we did. Oh brilliant, right. Just trying to sort this out. Yeah it's for some er it's for somebody to get a general idea of the kind of things that happen in lectures. It's what they say it's just the whole business of looking at lectures for the British National Corpus. The whole department's supposed to be involved and I keep forgetting to do it, possibly deliberately. Sorry... thing is just absurdly wired up...
[Barker:] Okay then ladies and gentlemen, hello, good evening and er something yes. Right, various bits of information for you. Erm, first of all I did promise to you that I'd give you some idea of the sort of material would be on next week's erm multiple guess questions, okay? So perhaps I'll just run through some of those. Erm, can I ask you please to point out to anybody who isn't here, which I guess is quite a number of people, there's probably six or seven people who're not here, er that the test is in fact next Tuesday, that's February the twenty second, is it? Okay, and you're asked to be erm in the lec sorry in the er great hall at five o'clock if you possibly can, okay? The session will take an hour. My guess is you may not need the hour to complete the er course work but er it's always difficult to say when you set the thing, yeah? Er it's partly using some questions that've been around for a very long time but there're some subtle variations and some new ones added in, okay? So they look a little bit different. If you've got a past paper, it won't do an awful lot of good. Erm, the idea of course is you haven't got past papers an er under no circumstances leave the exam hall with the paper, okay? Please leave it on on the table. What else to say about it? Basically you're gonna get erm some questions on motivation. I can't quantify these, I can't tell you how many there'll be, but there will be questions on motivation but before that there'll be some questions on the basics of of kind of y'know studying, work, psychology, the sort of thing you'll find in an introductory chapter er not only of the Arnold book but in other books as well. Erm, there's going to be a number of questions on the ho of er selection and testing, including stuff on reliability and validity. So that was the sort of stuff that did for you for a couple of weeks before Christmas. Okay, so that's selection, testing, reliability, validity. Erm, there'll be material on impression formation and attribution which of course a number of the did an essay on, person perception, yes? Personal perception? Is that a more familiar heading? Okay? There'll be something on job satisfaction, a number of questions on job satisfaction. And er there'll be a number of questions on stress and a number of questions on leadership. And when I last looked at it, one question on behaviour modification had managed to creep on there as well but I can't remember what the question is, so you'd better pay attention for the whole of the rest of this lecture in case I [LAUGHTER] in case I remember it. Okay, right erm, okay what else? Yes, erm for the final year students, your er assignment. Er the majority, but only just the majority of your assignments are complete and they are in six one eight to be picked up. Rather unfortunate because er er of course you d I can't tell you which ones I've done, which ones I haven't done, but all assignments will be back in six one eight, final year assignments, will be back in six one eight erm at some point early on Friday morning. Okay, so I've got thirty four remaining ones to mark and I've got er all day tomorrow to do that and some on Thursday and possibly some time tonight. So I'm I'm hopeful that I will comple well I'm certain that I will complete, barring accidents, the marking of final year assignments. So you'll be able to pick those up from six one eight on erm um um um on Friday morning, okay? So if you kind of er hang ar hang about til ten o'clock, they should be there by ten. And er generally I'm sort of very impressed with the standard of work on the essays so okay. Right, thanks very much for doing the erm the questionnaire last week, okay? You'll be you'll probably be interested in the results. I certainly was [LAUGHTER] Okay [LAUGHTER]... won't stretch that far you see [LAUGHTER] Okay, well basically you all felt appalling about tutorials and er, yes?
[speaker001:] How many all together?
[Barker:] Erm, there are between sixty and seventy... I think it's probably nearer the sixty end, I keep taking them out, rather than adding them in, okay? [LAUGHTER] you'll be pleased to know. I d I don't think you'll find it a strain to do in an hour. I think you'll find, at a minute a question, you'll b you're okay really
[speaker001:] group dynamics?
[Barker:] Nothing on group dynamics no. I've eliminated the group dynamics ones. Okay. Actually it's a good point because there will be er I will g be giving you different guidance obviously about the final exam where material which we haven't covered er we a examined here may well be examined, yeah? But a you've only had twenty minutes on group dynamics. I didn't really feel that there was very much there that I could I could ask you about at this stage, okay? Right, erm, okay, so tutorials then. Well erm basically the this the tutorials run by all run their course. I I've a feeling that er she may be seeing individual students this Friday er and that's all so er I don't think there will be a tutorial. Erm but there will be a new set of tutorials provided for you because I think there's a general recognition that you've been very badly treated indeed er as regards this erm and they're likely to be run by me in term three, okay? Now I'm not able to do tutorials for you this term at the times that you're available cos they clash with lectures that I do er for another course. So er the idea is that there will be tutorials provided in term three and I'll be giving you details, a published programme of those as well, okay? So there will be some tutorials. I know that many of you feel you've had almost nothing of value from the current tutorials and er erm which is rather unfortunate. In terms of lectures, there was a fairly normal distribution. That is that most of you felt they're okay, some of you felt they were quite good and some of you felt they were quite bad. They distributed normally quite well. Erm, some specific points that came up in the comments that you made. Er, firstly that I'm too fast and and er a number of people have said this to me so er and it's true [LAUGHTER] so [LAUGHTER] I don't wish to elaborate further on that [LAUGHTER]. However, I do respond well to requests to slow down so from all courses, so do erm make sort of gestures or something. Erm but okay. The point a lot of you made was that the course does seem to be very based on one text, the Arnold text and you're quite, well you're almost right about that. Ha about half of you thought that was a good thing and about half of you thought it was a bad thing. Erm th the general idea is that I'm actually responding to a request from last years' student group so that the previous lecturer did pass on to me that the student group had been unhappy that there were too many texts referred to as they couldn't necessarily get them from the library and they couldn't afford to buy more than one text. So it was minuted in a sort of staff student consultative group last year, so I have been requested to confine it in some measure to a single text. Erm, having said that, I've not always done that. So, for example, the lecture I'm going to give you today isn't reflected at all in Arnold erm so er I think it'd be helpful if I were to give you some indication of when there were and when there weren't. Erm but er I can appreciate obviously for you, particularly final year students, to have s y'know a single text which not all of you are not that keen on, but er some of you do see it as an advantage as well. Erm um what else? Yeah. The other thing, which a lot of you asked for, was more handouts and more overhead projector slides. Erm I I've had a couple of difficulties with those. Er one is actually getting the O H P's so that you can see them at the back. It's actually quite a deep lecture theatre, I think it's probably the biggest the University possesses outside the great hall, and er it it's difficult to get them large enough so that everyone can see at the back. One option might be that I'll produce some slides. There's a slide projector at the back of the hall which I can control from the front so I may be aiming to get some slides for you instead of the overhead projector. The other difficulty with handouts is there's an awful lot of you g to give the handouts to so we tend to waste a lot of time. Er but again y'know I could in theory provide some handouts for you which you could perhaps pick up at the end of the er of the lecture from the front or even have available in a general office for you, okay? So I do take note of those and I'll see what I can do about those, okay? Erm, having said that, I think lecturers tend to accumulate these things over time and this is the first year I've run this course so I don't have a great stock of things I can I can show you. Right, oh yes, what else? Erm, if he's here, could I see him afterwards about his request for er a questionnaire? Okay, so, where we got to last week then was looking at the analysis and modification of er work behaviour. So if we can erm take that a bit further. I think the last the last heading you got, well you put a heading down before we finished and that was organisational behaviour and modification. Is that true? Yes it is. Good. Okay. Well I think the the er other point I was making last week was that erm this whole are of learning theory is erm y'know a very traditional area. Bye [LAUGHTER]. Was it something I said already? [LAUGHTER] Erm, this whole area of learning theory is a very traditional area but it has it has been very influential actually very recently, despite being very ancient. It's been influential very recently in clinical psychology and also in work psychology. Erm so erm what we've got then is is the the idea of ah looking at some kind of behavioural analysis, although I'll got into behavioural analysis in just a few minutes. And also er looking at the kind of rewards that erm an employee might benefit. If you're going to use this by by rewarding specific desired behaviour you need to have a look at a reward list and there's a whole range of potential rewards that've been around. Simple feedback itself, feedback of performance, can be a powerful sort of reward, okay? But other people have used things like tokens which can be y'know saved up to exchanged for consumer durables for example. So er if you y'know do the desired behaviour, you collect so many vouchers and er y'know when you've got ten vouchers you exchange it for a television or something like that, but there's a whole range of things of that nature. Erm, okay, let's have a look briefly at the idea of a token economy. Now this is something more from clinical use but again has potential uses in work psychology. But the notion of a token economy is that you reward desired behaviour at the point at which the behaviour is performed, okay? And there's a lot of evidence which suggests that immediate reward is much more effective than delayed reward, okay? So it's important to reward at the point of the desired behaviour, okay? So for example pay schemes whereby pr productivity is rewarded once a year would seem to not y'know deal with that very effectively. Okay, so ha if you're going to reward at the point of of actually doing the desired behaviour you've got a problem because people er you may not be able to give them something appropriate at that time which is rewarding. The standard example comes from working with children. The child has behaved itself and you want to reward the child then you er you give them some kind of er a chocolate bar or something, or a handful of Smarties or something. Erm, the difficulty is that you can't really do that in work situations. People may be motivated by bigger rewards. So the idea is you have some kind of token so that er, classic example in sort of junior schools, primary schools, that y'know if a child actually does what you want it to do, it gets a kind of star in a star chart and added up so many stars it gets some kind of present and basically the same kind of thing can be applied in clinical and in occupational settings as well. So you're able to reward people ah with some kind of appropriate er some kind of token, a star or whatever it happens to be, some kind of token which it can then hav has a monetary value, okay? Er and in theory terms, primary reinforcers are something which meets biological needs, like food is a primary reinforcer, okay? Er however people are y'know are also reinforced by things which have no direct value. Like we are reinforced heavily by money. Money has no direct value, it has an exchange value. So the idea of tokens exchange value so they're rather like money. Er another idea is is which I think is can be useful here, particularly in comes to focusing problems and difficulties at work is the idea of a behavioural analysis, okay? Now a behavioural analysis, or perhaps another way of looking at this is a decision analysis, is quite interesting. The sort of thing you might do was, if you've got... a decision, is you might want to look t at the of that decision, okay? So you might want to look at erm er somebody's thoughts... feelings, something about the situation... okay? So you've got you've got things which set up or stimulate the behaviour or the decision. We can call that... okay? And we can have a look at some consequences of that... so you could have short term, long term consequences. You can break it down further, you can add in things here about what somebody wanted, okay, what somebody was trying to get hold of, what they wanted, and also perhaps what they wanted to avoid. So let's add a couple more columns in... and then back here you can have a look at whether they actually gain those, whether they got what they wanted. Then you can start looking at at er at alternatives... okay, and what you end up with is a is a way of analysing er a decision or a choice to behave in a certain way, okay? So you can look at ah a whole lot of things like this. I'm used to d using this kind of material in relation to people's decisions about addictive behaviours. Er so if you look at their smoking erm people can fill in a kind of smoking chart in which you look at that. Or again, at drinking behaviour. If somebody goes on a drinking binge that's the behaviour, the decision they make. What is going on that led up to that? What's what's the factors in y'know involved in that decision, that behaviour? What're the consequences of that, okay? So you've got a way of analysing behaviour and what that leads you into is the ability to manipulate the consequences of certain behaviour, okay? A lot of behavioural work is about manipulating the consequences, okay? So that er you can give somebody short term benefits and long term benefits for behaving differently, okay? You can identify alternative decisions, alternative behaviours, look at the consequences of those. You can also manipulate the outer feelings of the behaviour as well. Okay, so you've got an a kind of an analysis tool which will then enable you to look at how you may seek to modify behaviour. Okay. Let's have a look at a practical example now. Let's have a look at a sample study.... Okay and nineteen eight-one. Erm, they investigated the use of ear defenders in a high noise textile factory, okay? So the company had supplied ear defenders, they wanted their work force to use those ear defenders erm but in fact there was very little use of them. So the noise level in the factory was sufficient to be a threat to the er the hearing of their employees. The company had a responsibility to avoid that. Er but ear defender use is only thirty five percent, which is fairly grim. Okay, so what they did was they looked at what would be an attractive reinforcer in their work force erm, if if they were to persuade them to wear ear defenders, and they found out, from doing research in the work force, that consumer durables would be appropriate. That's what the work force would like as rewards for the desired behaviour, was consumer durables. Okay, so they got the base line measurement, thirty five percent people use them, then they went to a variable ratio er token economy system. Do you remember we talked about schedules of reinforcement last week? Yes? That you get one to one reinforcement. The rat's in the box, presses a lever, gets an item of food. But, if we make the reward of the item of food erm not predictable, okay, so it comes at variable intervals er then the rat actually works harder pressing the lever, it's more likely to do the behaviour and it's less likely to give up doing that behaviour afterwards, okay? So we know that a variable ratio reinforcement is likely to maximise the production of behaviour and erm also minimise the chance of that behaviour being given up immediately reinforcement is withdrawn. So there's theoretical grounds for suggesting that a variable er variable interval erm, did I say a variable interval or variable ratio? I've got variable ratio down here, token economy system would be used. Now what this meant in practice was that er y'know appropriate supervisors would appear at random intervals and give people tokens if they were wearing ear defenders, okay? But not all the time, okay? So a supervisor appears at random, on some occasions they get tokens, some occasions they don't. So any time a supervisor appears, which could be any time, you might get a token, okay? Now the tokens are actually worth quite a lot in in terms of consumer durables. It's a bit like the sort of green shield stamps idea, or Esso petrol stations, whatever it is, yes? If you're wearing the ear defenders when the supervisor comes round and happens to be on the token dishing out tour and you're wearing them, you get your token, okay? Collect so many tokens you get a T V or a washing machine or whatever it is that you want. You save up for the tokens to get what get y'know whatever it is you're after. Okay, that led to an immediate rise in the use of ear defenders to ninety percent, okay? So it went right up to ninety percent straight away. Er the the study actually lasted two months but the er the behaviour continued at ninety p at ninety percent for nine months' follow up. So, highly effective, and no drop off there. Another example, I won't give it in the same detail. Similar sort of principle erm and you give er you give people lottery tickets if they turn up on time. tried to increase er erm well reduce tardiness at work, make sure people turn up on time, you have somebody dishing out lottery tickets to people who get there by nine o'clock, something like that, okay? Similar sort of basis. Okay, well there's more technical detail I could go into but I think y'know I'm not sure how how useful it is to you. There's also more recent studies that you can look at as well, apart from that sample one I've given you. Erm but I think you will find that well covered in Arnold's book. I know I did in some some detail, particularly in the theory elements, which isn't in Arnold's book, but er I think you'll find that well covered there. Okay, any questions arising from that so far? Behaviour, the whole learning theory of behaviour and all that stuff at work?... Jolly good. Okay, well let's go on to the next topic I'm proposing to cover and that's communication in organisations.... Okay, you may be wondering why I'm wired up with not one but two microphones today. Th there is erm a study going on to do with something called the British National Corpus which I don't quite know what that's about but they they want er samples of the sort of things that lecturers do in lecture theatres. Erm [LAUGHTER] so I'm not quite sure how representative I am but er I think they do this every forty years or something and then they kind of analyse the sort of speech content, that sort of stuff. So they're just after a kind of random sample of Aston lecturers and as as the official random sample keep forgetting to put the er put the tape in the machine, or turn it on or whatever, it's handed on to me so I'm now wired up to an extraordinary degree. Anyway, communication organisations. First of all, I suggest to you that communication ar is an absolutely key process. At a common sense level you could argue it's not possible to have er any kind of relationship without communications so communication equals relationship, relationship equals communication, common sense idea. Y'know one way you can look at this as a social glue, another expression value. So you can look at er communication as relating to overall competence and perhaps at a stronger level than that, you could argue that erm communication determines not only the structure but also the strength and the scope of an organisation, okay? So communication very essential, if you like, it determines the structure, the strength and the scope of an organisation. Okay, now by the way you find this material actually covered in Arnold at all. There's nothing in Arnold on communication so for those of you who who particularly want me to stay with Arnold, sorry this time round. Erm but you will find quite a lot of relevant material in and, or alternatively and, depending on which edition you've got and and elsewhere also. Okay, let's have a look at the basic idea of communication. Basically what we're talking about is.... Okay, so that's the kind of basic idea. Okay, in terms of communication. If you've got an idea or a message to send it has to be encoded in some way then there's various mediums or media by which it can be transmitted but it's got to be decoded by the receiver for the idea or message to be understood, and there's some kind of feedback mechanism potentially from the receiver to the sender. And we should bear in mind that there's potential noise, okay, affecting many parts of this. Okay, well let's have a look at different forms of communication. I think we can start of on this at this heading of er forms of communication. Have you all got that down by the way? Do you want to, do you want me to shut up while you write that down? Yes you do really don't you? I shall just look decorative for a couple of minutes.... Right, so, forms of communication then, a sub-heading. Different forms, well let's concentrate on two, oral communication, written communication. Okay well I think oral communication is mostly two way, that's one distinction we can make. Written communication mostly one way. Let let's relate this to organisation. Do you go and tell somebody about something, or do you write them a memo? Okay, so the memo version is pretty well one way people write memos back but it it's a kind of one way communication if you give somebody some information in a memo, okay? Should you be writing? Should you be speaking to them personally? Well research suggests that something like eighty eight percent, that's research by Klaus and Bass, Klaus and Bass nineteen eighty-eight, actually I may have got that date wrong so I'm not sure you should quote the date, anyway it's Klaus and Bass. Eighty three percent of communication in a in a sample organisation was face to face rather than with memoranda. The general preference was that if the message or the information was ambiguous, it was preferable to use oral forms of communication. So if it's an ambiguous message go and tell somebody about it so it can be clarified. On the other hand, if it was quite clear and unambiguous then a written form was preferred... Okay, now a study by Daft et al, Daft as in y'know one marble short of a whatever yeah or okay er Daft et al nineteen eighty-seven had a look at managers' use of er of these two different media and found that in general most managers were media sensitive. What they meant by that was that managers would do the kind of thing I've just described like y'know transmit an ambiguous message orally rather than in a memo and visa versa. However there was a y'know significant minority who were not media sensitive, who seemed to send out messages pretty well at random erm they'd use whatever medium they happened to think of at the t off the spur of the moment rather than actually relating the medium to the message if you like. And er what they found was that the media sensitive managers were much more likely to be regarded as highly successful and sensitivity in selection of media by relating the medium to the message would seem to relate quite closely to erm y'know high performance as a manager... Let's have a look at non-verbal behaviour. There's a number of fairly obvious things here. Perhaps the most obvious one is to do with dress, like how do you dress at a at a job interview, how do you dress in a particular sort of er function at work. There's certainly amongst managers, certainly amongst male managers that there is an assumption that people wear suits, isn't there? So you hear sometimes hear in an organisation when a manager approaches like, here come the suits the the er. It's very interesting working in a university, what is appropriate for university lecturers to wear. Certainly er the higher up the the kind of er organisation at a university the tendency is to is to wear different things. O much more complex perhaps for women as well, more choices there. Nothing very radical to tell you about that, just to sort of mention it. Issues about time are quite interesting also. Er, if you look at status and length of time you get kept waiting, then the length of time you get kept waiting reflects the status differential between you and the person you're waiting on, okay? We've all had to wait for doctors and dentists, yeah? This is cos they tend to be high status professionals who's time is relatively precious, so that you can go to the extent of actually having waiting rooms that you can be kept hanging around in. Erm, if you look at organisations then if you if you go and er visit somebody of low status, you tend not to be kept waiting very long at all. Erm, medium status it may go up to more like five minutes, very high status it may be approaching ten minutes, okay? So there is a relationship there. Yeah? Yes, yes, you're absolutely right. It's it's to do with the difference if you like. Given, let let's say y'know somebody of a status goes to see somebody of equivalent status wait so it's it's about the distance, yeah. okay? Erm and it's it's quite interesting to look at that. What else? There's something else about use of space as well. Certainly within universities the more senior the the member of staff the more likely they are apparently to use a desk as a barrier erm so that they sort of er y'know you see them from behind a desk, when you're at the front of the desk and they're behind the desk. Erm if you look at er at a standard sort of table, look at a standard sort of rectangular table y'know person sitting here relative to ones sitting there, tends to be of higher status. Indeed, if you've got groups with no status distinctions between them the person who, by chance, lands up sitting there tends to end up behaving as a leader, okay? So there's a relationship between space, status and leadership there. Erm you can a even look at er look at erm this sort of er non-verbal messages about organisations in terms of architecture. That's an interesting one. Erm, not very relevant to your course unfortunately but very interesting stuff. If you're at all interested in that area then I have got you a reference I can give you to hand but it's but a great deal of er architecture, certainly the thirties, forties, fifties reflected corporate status, corporate identity. Erm if you look at er the kind of erm soviet er architecture of the thirties and you can relate that quite nicely to a kind of American corporate architecture in the fifties designed to project certain sort of things. Erm,i there's y'know construct architecture as any other form of er communication that must be quite an interesting thing to do. How about, perhaps at this point, having a look at non-verbal behaviour, perhaps more broadly? I'm gonna suggest to you that er if w if we're going to think about channels of communication then we could arguably divide up inter-personal communication to three broad sets of channels so it will will be familiar to some students already I think, er but not certainly not to many second years. I hope not anyway. Erm, very broadly, we can distinguish between verbal communication yes the words we choose to use inter-personally, okay, verbal communication. No I I'd suggest perhaps a couple of categories of non-verbal communication. Er, a category you could call, loosely, vocal and a category we could call body language perhaps, okay? So what I want to suggest is that the second two categories I've mentioned, that's the vocal channel and the body language channel can actually be very important in communication. What I'd like you to do now is er, just for a couple of minutes, informally with the people sitting next to you, see if you can list as many channels as you can under those second two headings, okay? I don't want you to tell me about the messages that those channel give, okay? Let me give you an example to start with. Erm, under body language you mi there might be a category of er channels around the theme of gesture, okay? Now one or two gestures have very specific meanings as
[speaker001:] [LAUGHTER]
[Barker:] perhaps you're aware, okay? I'm not interested in you telling me what those meaning are or coming out with kind of y'know ideas that crossing your arms means that you're defensive or anything like that. I'm interested in the channels themselves, okay? So I'm interested in non-verbal channels in terms of body language y'know what do you do with your body that's communicative? And non-verbal channels in terms of voice, okay? What is there about the voice, vocal channels that're not to do with the actual words spoken? Two minutes then [general background chatter from students] Okay then erm I guess that's your couple of minutes up. Erm I hope you've lots of interesting ideas. Let's go for the for the sort of erm the vocal bit first. What kind of channels have you come up with in terms of vocal communication?... Yeah, intonational tone, okay? Very very critical one, intonation of tone. What else? Volume, right, speed, tone, so you've got tone volume speed. What else? Clarity yes mhm okay go for that... I'm not fussy I mean you can. What else?... What about what about issues around around fluency? Okay, to do with pauses for example. You can have you can have stuff to do with fluency. C can you spot when a speaker is nervous? As as students in a lecture you can tell when a lecturer is nervous. Okay, because they stumble over their words, they mistakes yes okay? So things about fluency. You can it's fairly easy to distinguish between somebody who's not very fluent because there's something technically very difficult about the topic and they can't actually explain it and er and somebody who's actually very nervous so you get different kinds of of er speech errors fluency and speech errors. Anything else there? Because I t I go for verbal as the actual choice of words, okay? So can you imagine if you had a conversation with somebody from er er another country and you had no language in common at all? You would still ha be able to have some kind of interaction but it wouldn't actually be verbal because there would be no words in common, okay? If I give you an example. Erm, if you may not have had to do this, you may have to in the future. If you've got a toddler with you, a two year old and this toddler is is sort of er y'know you're looking in the shop window and this toddler's sort of thirty yards away and about to walk in front of a bus okay? Then it doesn't matter so much what you say that stops it walking in front of the bus, it's actually how you say it. Does that make sense? A and think of think of, anybody here got dogs? Or familiar with dogs? Yeah? You c it's not what you say to the dog, it's how you say it y'know. It's er it's like, y'know if your dog's called Rover, it's if you want get it to pay attention, it's the way you say Rover or B M W or [LAUGHTER]. Erm okay so vocal is about the w is about how you use your voice. Let's go on to the second category, the er the body language bit. Who's got who's got some headings that some some channelled under body language?... Any suggestions?
[speaker001:] Posture
[Barker:] Posture, thank you
[speaker001:] Facial expression
[Barker:] Facial expression, very very critical one. Facial expression, yeah
[speaker001:] Stance
[Barker:] Stance yeah. I think stance is a kind of sub-category of posture. Posture perhaps sitting stance something else yeah Well we've got gesture Yeah, gesture, right... What else? You must have thought of some more than that. What about issues about personal space? Social distance, yeah? Okay, you'll find there're big er cultural differences there. Okay, we're we're a non, in the U K as a culture we don't stand very close to people but actually women stand a lot closer to women than women to men or men to men. Erm, touch? It's a form of communication Erm smell's an interesting one. Smell tends doesn't seem to be that relevant. I think I think er these days people take er take baths and showers quite often and you have to be pretty close to somebody before you smell them I guess, I mean I hope you do anyway [LAUGHTER]. Yeah, it's interesting that. It used to be much more important. Er apparently there's a story about Napoleon and not tonight Josephine stuff. I I the way I s I think I think was it Josephine he was married to, then then she would er she would object very strongly if he had a bath before they went to bed together. She liked him to smell really strongly so so, people have very personal smells. You know if you're very attached to somebody, you're very attached to the smell of them. Er yeah. Okay,y it's true. Okay, what else? What else have you got er under that under the body language? Eye contact. Eye contact, direction of gaze, that sort of stuff. Okay now is that sort of stuff important, do you reckon? Is it is it important? Yeah okay. Just to kind of get a feel of that importance, erm let's think about some categories of communication which we may not use verbal channels for very much, okay? Two or three categories here. First category I suggest is is about attitude in the sense of liking, disliking. We don't tend to go up to people and say, I like you, okay? Very much, okay? Imagine yourself in a night club. D do you go to night clubs? [LAUGHTER] Ima okay, suppose you're at a night club and suppose that you really like somebody you've been dancing with. How do you communicate to them that you really like them? Do you go up to them and say, I like you?
[speaker001:] [LAUGHTER]
[Barker:] It could be an interesting approach but, I mean what do you do? I mean do you er stand nearer them? Look at them more? Find excuses to brush against them? Touch yeah? Okay, it's all done non-verbally, yeah? And suppose suppose that you've been dancing with somebody and you really don't like them at all. How d'you c how d'you persuade them to go away? Well qu [LAUGHTER] alright okay. So I think a stuff about attitude, liking, disliking. The second category would be emotion. I d very often we don't label our emotions verbally. We communicate how we feel non-verbally, okay? And the third the third category would be er would be that punctuation, we we use non-verbal communication to punctuate er verbal interactions. Y'know if you wanna have a go, you wanna say something, then you make quite subtle gestures to catch the eye of somebody and so on. So we punctuate this stuff. So I'm gonna suggest that extremely important for these categories of communication, maybe less important if you're dealing with er purely technical interactions, purely technical conversations. Erm but if you're dealing with issues about human relationship then they're very very important, very powerful and er they they can make a huge difference familiarity, sensitivity in the use of this kind of can be very important... Okay, we'll come back to that cos I w when we come when we're actually looking at improving communication we'll come back to those issues. Okay, let's have another heading. Let's have a look at major influences er on communication in organisations. I think it w basically an organisational structure is important. Like y'know we we've mentioned organisational structure I think in the very first lecture er that idea, the idea that you've got a kind of box at the top labelled president and you've got two boxes underneath labelled vice president and you've got y'know one box goes off to sales manager y'know the sort of thing I mean, okay? So the shape of those things can be very important and, if we're going to look at those, y'know look at communication within an organisational structure we can think about communication that goes up from the bottom of the organisational structure to the top, we can look at communication that goes down, from the top of the organisation downwards and we can look at communication that goes across, okay? So three ways in which communications may flow, okay? And the communications in fact will be of a quite a different nature in each of those categories. So if you have a look at the idea of communication flowing down from the top of the structure lower down then w what's that communication going to be including? Well I'd suggest it includes, for example, instructions, erm directions, or perhaps more bluntly, orders. Okay so directions, instructions, orders, flowing down from the top of the structure to the bottom of the structure and perhaps also some feedback as well. Okay, so we're looking at a flow of communication from the top of the structure to the bottom of the structure, orders, directions, instructions, feedback. Interesting point here is, are these orders, directions, instructions, whatever, are they accurately perceived towards the bottom of the hierarchy, okay? So there's a very interesting study by a person who's name I'm going to write on the board... okay so or et al nineteen ninety. Okay, what th what er this research looked at was the accuracy of perception of communication. Now clearly there's a distinction to be drawn oral oral communication and written communication but they were doing this generally. Y'know at this point not necessarily to ds distinguish between oral and written communication. What they found was there was actually sometimes substantial differences between what the managers thought they had communicated and what the subordinate thought they'd received, okay? So there's a potential gap, a potential meaning gap there. What's been said, what's been heard. Okay now, obviously the the greater the number of channels things go through, the greater potential for for the confusion, okay? So there's classic sort of stories about organisation where the the er president of the organisation asks somebody to investigate something and that gets translated by the vice president into sort of rather more hostile sort of thing and basically it ends up with somebody at the bottom of the pile having their ass kicked or whatever because it's been translated, or mis- translated down, okay? Now, even where there is no mis-translation present, there's still a possibility of a gap in perception and er s this research identified that gap in in perception was associated with er with poor outcomes, okay, whatever the particular problem was, that the bigger the misperception, the worse the outcome around. Okay, let me just finish this section then we'll take er we'll er we'll take a break to er take a break for the rest of the day actually yes [LAUGHTER]. Erm, in terms of communication up an organisation if that doesn't sound to rude but erm okay, from the bottom of the organisation to the top of the organisation, there's a hell of a lot less of it, okay? There's far more communication flowing down than there is flowing up. There's a very old study by Walker and Guest nineteen fifty-two and I think you might find the findings may reflect the fifties quite a lot, found that seventy percent of assembly line workers erm initiated upwards communication. In other words, initiated communication with their supervisor erm less than once a month, okay? So very little init initiation of communication up the hierarchy, okay? Now this may reflect the 1950's, it may reflect er traditional manufacturing practices in ah probably in the U K. Erm, if you look at managers, manager are at a y'know, most managers are mid-point in communication hierarchies. You'll find that by and Larson, I'll put that on the board for you... and Larson nineteen eighty-six, found that managers only direct fifteen percent of their communication upwards, okay? So managers erm essentially communicate downwards, okay? They may be communicated with from above but the communication that init they initiate only fifteen percent of that communication is initiated upwards. speculate why not, of course. Why t why c why do they not communicate upwards and I think essentially people it in subordinate positions are about managing the impressions others have of them and tend to believe the notion, no matter how true it is, that er that organisations may have a shoot the messenger philosophy, yes? Nobody likes to be the bearer of bad news. You don't want to be the one who tells your boss that er a production line has broken down again or y'know that they've failed to meet their sales targets for the third month running, whatever it is, okay? People like to present good news, like to present themselves favourably and of course organisations, many organisations, do in practice have a y'know shoot the messenger y'know if the messenger brings bad news, shoot the messenger er philosophy. Y'know as a manager you don't want to hear problems, you don't want to hear bad news, you don't want to hear disaster. It's very easy then of course to punish the person er who communicates that with you er which ultimately can can er totally divorce an organisation from the reality of what it's actually doing so that kind of philosophy, very destructive in terms of er effective communication. Okay well next week we'll carry on with this material, looking at communication networks. Now I'm sure you'd like to know what I'm gonna be teaching next week apart from this so if you'd like to read ahead, we'll be looking at decision-making in organisations, okay? If you'd like to try and find that. I don't think that's in Arnold... Sorry? [shouting] Oh, it's not next week. It's assessment next week [] [LAUGHTER] sorry about that. Can I speak to as well please? So can I speak to to and to if they're here?... gotta get through with a prayer now. What do you think of the new room then? It's warmer. I don't like the layout very much though. Now this is, as far as I'm concerned, this is the last lecture you're gonna get off of me. We've got a seminar coming up and I think I'll arrange to show Jeannie. Er, hands up who saw the Horizon programme on Jeannie... Okay, so so you don't want to see it then do you really? You you You only saw the f oh now oh right so, hands up who saw it all the way through and would not want to see it again as part of the seminar. One two three four. So four of you don't want to see it. What shall we do then? We can arrange the seminar to have different slots so the ones who don't want to watch Jeannie we can discuss erm, what would you like to discuss? I'll come up with a topic Wah, we're not doing that. We're doing that today. Okay, so I'm covering the exam stuff today. But you can use the Jeannie slot as erm a revision thing, you come and have a chat with me about the course, or we can show the video. What I'll do is arrange to show the video for the seminar in case you haven't got any questions, yeah? You normally haven't anyway. I mean you don't normally don't want to talk to me.
[speaker001:] [LAUGHTER] aah
[Barker:] Play to the sympathy if nothing else. Okay, now what I've got here are two handouts crumpled or stapled together as one. Now these represent two lectures on group processes that're given to the first year social psychology students at Aston. These aren't my lecture notes they I cribbed them off the social psychologist and made copies last night. Some of you will only have two sheets. Erm, if that's the case, you'll notice that the two copies that you've got have the writing on the back. So some of them have got both sides, some of them have got a mixture. Some of you will only have three sheets, which the last one will have it on two sides. So whi what I'm trying to say to you is that you should have four sides of written text, whether it's on two pages, three or four... What I will do is go through the headings and give you a very brief description of that so that you know roughly what's in them. I'm not gonna spend a I mean there's a good couple of hours talking here and w I'm gonna use the time more productively I think talking about other aspects of the course. Now, starts off, most of it taken from social psychology text books. Er and is the sort of standard one that we were using at Aston when these handouts were written erm but you should find that the same sorts of things are discussed in or in Atkinson. I think has probably got a better coverage on groups. I'm not sure but I think it has. It turns out that trying to define what a group is is quite difficult a what distinguishes a group of people from a mob of people er a group of people queuing at a bus stop, are they a group well you don't think so normally. So erm the first paragraph there deals with erm how people have defined groups. No definition is spot on really, you can always find difficulties with it but they do sort of discuss it in the first paragraph. The next one is saying, okay, do people change their behaviour in the presence of others? Well really that's l by and large what groups is all about so it's clearly that they do and there's some cases here of sort of cyclists cycling harder and faster when they've got they're training with other cyclists or erm when they're training against the clock. Some sort of buzz words known as social facilitation and social inhibition which come from the work of Allport. Looking at how people's behaviour or performance is either improved or detracted from in the presence of others. Right so we talk about social facilitation and inhibition. It's an all embracing term actually and it could be taken across many aspects. You can link it up with the work on that was done on human performance. It turns out that if you're gonna give a talk or something and it's a talk that's well rehearsed and well known, you give it better when there's a lot of people in a passive audience than when there's one or two. However, if it's something you're not very confident and sure about, quite often the presence of other people makes you fall to bits. If you ever try to do a ha a demonstration for anybody erm or a group of people involving a sort of manual skill, you find that it goes to pieces if it's not a very well rehearsed skill, whereas you find you can actually get very your performance is a lot better when you've got an audience if you know the skill very well. You find it in motor skills. I think that's mentioned in there as well. Erm distinction made when you're sort of talking about audiences th the sort of participating audience where we interact and there's the one where I sort of talk to you and you're passive that. Groups have been sort of defined in different types of groups. People try to classify what sorts of group or characteristics there are of groups and you find that people look at group size, let's go through the list, group size, communication networks, roles and expectations, norms and rules, okay well roles and expectations, norms and rules slightly different. So what it's talking about there is how you can actually define a group. I mean if you allow everybody in the group to have free access to everybody else in the group you may get a sort of different characteristic erm than if you only allow certain hierarchy to exist within the group, certain lines of communication. A lot of work done in the fifties by a chap called and perhaps I think is was a later work based on the early work of..., I can't remember exactly. Okay, it starts so what we're talking there in text books you'll find they define groups in terms of their structure and their composition and they're the sorts of things that they usually pick out... Okay, there's a lot of work then on interaction in groups. You can link this also up with the work that was done on conformity with the Ash experiments. D'you remember the video where you had a group of people all agreeing different sizes and group size was an important aspect of erm whether or not people tended to conform. So you can link that up with the earlier work that we did. There's a list of references there. Well they're there for just covering the ones that're in the handout. I don't expect you to actually read any. Go and read if you're gon a good introductory si social psychology book like and