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Topic: Supportive Communication In this essay we are going to discuss and evaluate a kind of interpersonal communication that helps managers to communicate accurately and honestly without jeopardizing interpersonal relationships – namely, supportive communication (Cole 1999). Positive supportive communication not only can enhance personal image and social acceptance, also is an essential value in organization.
Bentley (1999) point out that, with supportive communication, organization have this positive relationship tends to have a higher productivity, faster problem solving leads to less conflict between managers and employees, even individual feel more successful because of higher leanings. It means that supportive communication is an important tool to help organization to accomplish their goals. To build up an effective and efficient organizing, there is a need of supportive environment, good leadership and effective communication. It is an advantage to both company and individuals.
This essay is going to illustrate how supportive communication affect an organization and the factors involved in maintaining and building an effective organization. In this essay, there are three different peer- reviewed articles, which talk about supportive communication in the frame work within an organization, academic stress and health. According to the information in U. S. Bureau of Labor (2004), over 50% of the married households were reckoned to have “dual-income”. “Dual income” means that both parents were working. Families with children at home would require more fund to support.
However, both parents working will create difficult struggle for them to balance between work and family demands. There is a good example that showed the serious of this problem. Hill, Hawkins, Ferris, and Weitzman (2001) had done a survey on 6451 IBM employees. The result has shown that around 50% of the participants reported to have problem to maintain balance between work and family. To improve this situation Clark (2000) had introduced a border theory. This theory framework is focus on how to manage relationship between work and family o create and maintain balance.
This theory will describe later in this essay. Another example that appeared supportive communication is relevant – there was a questionnaire packet survey on instruments relevant to the present study interspersed with other, non-relevant instruments has taken at two Eastern universities. 739 of questionnaires had been collected. Xu and Burleson (2001) had an Expericenced Support instrument to measure the scale. The result of the survey shown that students standard of feeling stress is 5 (degree form 1-7, 1 is strongly disagree and 7 is strongly agree).
This example shown students are feeling stressed and how much informational supportive communication received from closed friends and families are essential to release this problem. Emotional support, like, attentive listening, and informational support, such as advice and training, had been use to solve this problem in this survey. More about that will describe later in this essay. The last scenario I would like to discuss is Seidman (2000) found out nearly 50% of those students attended college fail to obtain a bachelor degree.
To help these academic-at-risk student Center for Basic Skill (CBS) programs provide support to students, such as academic support and personal advice support, this is supportive communication. With this program students can better off to get retention in college. The author also use two models to evaluate this risk, they are Epidemiological Model, Social Constructivist Model. These two model help to reduce number of at-risk-student. Further detail on how to help students by supportive communication will discuss later in this essay.
This essay emphasize that how important the balance between interaction of work envoironment and interaction between family environment. We have discuss in pervious part of the essay that 50% of the Americans families suffer in uneven distribution communication between family and work and Clark (2000) had introduced a border theory to improve this problem. . This interaction between these two factors – family and work, is the central focus in border theory. Border theory is helping people according to individual situation, to create and maintain balance.
Clark (2000) got her idea for work/family border theory based on concept of Lewin (1996) conception of regions to divide boundaries within individuals’ lifespace. However, Clark state that ambiguous may occur where there is too osmosis and flexible between the borders. A strong layer between family and work will benefit to certain people (Edwards and Rothbard 1999). Based on the responses form 1700 employees, researchers found out that borders between family and work are tightly impacted by the perceptions of importance to employees about work and family.
It simply means that how they put weight between work and family. For people who feel their work is not important and pervade work into family domain is classified as intrusive. In other hand, for those who think their families are more important an intrusive of work into family domain will not happened. Also, Frone et al. (1992) found out that conflict between family members and more common than conflict between managers and employees. The proportion of family conflict is 60% while work conflict is only 20%. It can be seen from this theory that there is a need of communication to achieve work-family balance.
That communication is supportive communication. Coaching is processes that will help you get your people t do their best work (Florence 1999). Therefore, coaching and counseling is one of the main tools of supportive communication. With coaching it can help to improve ability problem. Manager can give direction and advice to help employees to understand their weakness so as to improve them. Individuals will not have negative feelings since managers are coaching instead of blaming, even negative feedback is given individuals can recognize their problem and get improvement.
In this way positive image and relationship is built. Moreover, the second scenario is described about the academic stress. Author of this article said that Emotional support had a main effect on depression and informational support has effect on physical illness. Emotional support is attentive listening, notarize the experience of emotional experience and expression, and states by Burleson & Goldsmith (1998), positive regard are theorized to create a context in which negative cognitions and emotions can be effectively processed.
While informational supportive effect on physical illness, informational support, included giving advice, information and training, this kind of support help student to engage healthy activity, such as healthy eating, doing enough exercise and enough sleep. This study was design to inspect the extent of supportive communication mitigate between students’ heath and academic health. With these two methods of supportive communication, students can release stress cause by assignments exams and all other academic tests.
Advice from informational support can help student keeping themselves healthy at any time, not study too late in exam, or spend all night before exam without resting. In this case, physically and mentally are also supported because of an essential kind of communication – supportive communication. Finally, this method can reduce the risk of failing the course and exclude from the university. The last scenario we have talk about is also evaluate on students, it is about academic risk is a junction of individual, social, and cultural communication phenomena.
Roueche & Roueche (1994) stated that those family who had supportive communication is important to help in motivating at-risk-student to succeed, while this kind of communication teach students social norms are needed in the college environment. Garard & Hunt (1998) and Hunt & Lippert (1999) state that improvement in communication skill will improvement academic success. There are some approaches of education risk focus on students’ characteristics inherent.
Epidemiological model, which had mentioned before, identifies students who are at the edge of failure requirements of college need if they process “deficient” characteristics. The students with this character usually engage learning disable or low self-esteem. Under this model many students had improved their grade by understanding their weakness of individual’s characteristics. Since communication had create while advisor giving advice and teaching what students should do in a positive way, supportive communication has being build. Then social constructivist Model (Richardson et al. 989) suggested that certain student may at-risk in different classroom. They will change their attitude according to environment and to the person they are communicating to. Educators should interact with student by encounter their daily basic to classify the difference. This model also has the outcome of improve communication on teachers and students while teachers are observing and encountering their students. The CBS program had mention in pervious paragraph state that this program gives students information and advice to help them reduce academic risk.
This is also a kind of supportive communication. This program makes communication more success. Albrecht & Adelman (1987), Granovetter (1973) and Haythornthwaite (2000) suggested that the program develops strong bridge between student and advisor through frequent communication. Individuals build strong relationship base on intimacy, self-disclosure and many types of interactions. Again, this program need plenty of communication between individuals, advisors, family, friends and teachers, they are going to interact with each other under this program, so communication has been build.
Also, this kind of communication usually are positive, helpful and will give listener certain kind of support towards study, therefore, it is a kind of supportive communication. From all of the above discuss, we can see there are five advantages can be classified. Firstly, with supportive communication by managers to employees, the organizations become more productive. Workers work more efficient and effective because of positive communication being obtain form manager. Blaming can change to advice.
Secondly, manager attentive listening, consulting and coaching give rights to positive feedback and feeling while communicating with workers. Better relationship and better workplace atmosphere can be built. Thirdly, family conflict is decrease. When family and friends are supporting each other in their work and study, they will feel warm and comfortable, a well relationship also being built by supportive communication in this way. Fourthly, with the help of Epidemiological Model, Social Constructivist Model and CBS program at-risk-academic student is reduced.
When processing this program and practicing this model, communication and trust will create, and these factors are essential component of supportive communication. Lastly, academic stress had decrease because of supportive communication. Emotional and informational communication helps students to realize their weakness and improve them. This two communication also factors of support communication. There are so many advantages to supportive communication, however, there are several limitations to supportive communication.
Firstly, organization need to spend time and resources on training manager the way of positive communication to employees, the resources can be use in other way which may give organization more profit. Secondly, same as educational institution, they can use the resources in many other ways, like build some welfare facilities. Thirdly, there is limitation in doing research in addition to calculate participant’s result about others’ behavior, some kind of support behavior in third party objective method should be taken place. Also, they an be more ethical when choosing sample, because individual are from different country and with different culture, therefore, behavior maybe different to some extent. To conclude, supportive communication is a kind of communication which communicates accurately, honestly without jeopardizing interpersonal relationship. Accurate message will enhance positive supportive communication. Good relationship will build up when two people are interchange idea accurately, patiently, and in a good manner. Researcher had done survey to understand what supportive communication is.
Everywhere need supportive communication to improve a better off communication between each other. Workplace is one of the example we have been talking about, manager use supportive communication method when communicate with workers. Research found out that proportion in percentage of work conflict is greater than percentage in family conflict. Border theory had been use to distinguish boundaries between workplace and family, in this many family conflict can be avoided. Emotional and informational support communication from friends and family can help reducing academic stress.
Epidemiological Model, Social Constructivist Model and BCS program had used to help improve support communication. This kind of communication is an important in communication between one and other. This essay had provided information of lead to a better understanding communication direction needs base on research by models, hypothesis and survey. ? Reference: Albrecht, T. L. , & Adelman, M. B. (1987). Communication networks as structures of social support, Communicating social support 56(12): 40-63 Bentley, T. 1999. The space between.
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