Interpersonal Communication at its Best
Simply put, Interpersonal Communication is the social interaction between two or more people. Interpersonal communication is the process through which relationships are initiated, negotiated, maintained, and ended. Interpersonal skills are vital if we want to develop and maintain relationships, and these relationships are vital for personal well-being (Spitzberg and Cupach 484, 2011). Most individuals interact with dozens, even hundreds, of people on a daily basis. Simple greetings, giving advice or directions, emotionally supporting, debates, and even arguments can be considered to be interpersonal skills. So what happens when someone doesn’t seem to have any interpersonal skills? Or has any motive to develop them? Interpersonal skills in your personal and professional life are extremely important, without them success ceases and failure emerges. As college students, interpersonal communication skills with classmates, especially within groups, are vital to everyone’s success. What happens when teammates are uncooperative and silent? What are the tools and skills necessary to achieve success within the group?
Spitzberg and Cupach (2011) note interpersonal skills are vital to personal well-being. This can’t be truer when working with a group or team in an academic or professional setting when trying to achieve a common goal. My final semester as an undergraduate student, I needed to pass my Public Relations Campaigns class. A class where a real, live campaign needed to be researched, developed, and presented to a panel of judges and to the chosen campaign’s manager or owner. My group and I chose the San Antonio Humane Society, a non-profit, animal saving, no killing organization, which has been serving San Antonio and its surrounding areas since 1952. My group consisted of five other classmates, three of which were not graduating that semester, so the “big deal” of passing this “pass/fail” project was not a high concern for them. However, for me and the two other group members, passing this project was the highest and most important priority. The non-graduating teammates seemed bored, uninterested, and did little contribution or cooperated much with ideas and suggestions, their interpersonal skills were extremely low and not up to par.
The non-graduating group members seemed to lack basic supportiveness competency. They did not feel as if being supportive, cooperative, and understanding our situation as significant. They even lacked the ability to really interact with us well, or even at all sometimes (Spangle and Moorhead 47, 1998). Us caring members felt like we were the ones being left out, because the other members did not contribute or had the motivation to contribute to the achieve the same success and goal we were hoping to have. We even got to a point where we had to bribe them with Starbucks just to get them to attend our group meetings and at least try to get them involved with some decision-making factors. During the same semester, another group member and I were in the same Communication Theories class and came across the Functional Group Decision-Making Theory, a theory also listed in Dainton and Zelley (2011).
The Functional Group Decision-Making Theory by researcher Gouran and Hirokawa associated the functional approach to group communication and theorized why some groups make good decisions and other groups make bad decisions. To answer that question, the theory asks whether or not the group has successfully accomplished four functions, which they call requisite functions. These functions are: problem analysis, goal setting, identifying alternatives, and evaluate and select. We applied this theory to our group, not only for personal purposes of getting the other group members to contribute, but also for the campaign itself. Though the theory doesn’t entirely apply to our situation, it at least guided us in what we needed to do in order to get our other group members to participate and contribute.
We first started to analyze our situation/problem. We already knew the basis of their uncooperativeness and their lack of interest because they weren’t graduating, and if they failed this project and failed the class, they could just take it again next semester. That was our basic problem analysis. We then needed to set a goal for what we were trying to accomplish (Dainton and Zelley 92, 2011). In this case, we were trying to get the rest of the group members to engage in conversation and communicate with us, to participate and cooperate, and to include themselves in campaign strategies and decision-making. Then, to identify alternative solutions, Dainton and Zelley (92, 2011) mention group members should brainstorm in order to generate many possible solutions to generate a possible good solution. Unfortunately, we didn’t have much that we could do. If anything we could of reported these group members to the instructor and have them kicked off our team. Even though their contribution was minimal, it existed. We just wanted them to be actively involved. Finally, we had to evaluate and select a solution. This function doesn’t necessarily apply to our situation; however, we did implement the Agenda-Setting Theory in hopes of showing them that their lack of academic success can greatly influence their future and their career.
The Agenda-Setting Theory is based on the principle that the media doesn’t exactly tell the public what to think, but what to think about (Dainton and Zelley 169, 2011). In this sense, we simply gave the non-graduating group members articles and stories about how success in college can lead to success in life and in careers. We found about four or five relevant articles and gave it to them to read with other class and project material – we just “slipped” it in there and hoped they would read it. We were acting as news media in hopes to influence the other members about their lack of concern for their education and success, and hoped these articles would at least shed some light on what they are and aren’t doing to be successful for themselves and others whom they would have to interact and work with.
Our Agenda-Setting Theory experiment slightly worked on two of the non-graduating members as far as them contributing a little more to the group project and content. We never mentioned the articles or if they read them, we simply just carried out our normal routines and group meetings. The third non-graduating member still wasn’t fazed about the importance of our project or achieving our goal of successfully planning a campaign. The only contribution that member had was some research and writing a small conclusion to the research they found – Hardly enough to fully impact a full, live campaign.
Our interpersonal communication skills towards these members were very open and we encouraged everyone to practice openness within the group in order to get honest and genuine information, concerns, and suggestions from all group members. Obviously, we incorporated the social relaxation competency during the first few interactions with the group just in case their lack of communication or engagement was because they were shy or uncomfortable. So we tried to get them to open up by having a short meeting at Starbucks on campus and see if we could find any common interests to break the ice. We also encouraged feedback whenever new topics or decisions were discussed. Just because we were the only ones who were actually doing the work, we did not by any means neglect to make the other members feel left out. Instead, we constantly asked for their opinions, suggestions, and any new ideas they might have towards accomplishing our common goal for the campaign (Spangle and Moorhead 1998).
It came to a point where we really needed everyone to cooperate and take charge of certain sections of the campaign. One of the graduating girls intentionally started crying to another group member in close proximity to the rest of the group sobbing about how half of the group isn’t doing the work and how she felt concerned about failing the class and not graduating. This led to the grapevine effect. Once one of the non-graduating group members saw and heard the crying member sob about her concerns, this member became a news source to the other group members (Spangle and Moorhead 97, 1998). This final, desperate attempt to influence the group members miraculously worked! Only a few weeks before our presentation of the campaign, the group worked cohesively and cooperatively together to create a solid, successful case study for our San Antonio Humane Society campaign. And somehow despite all odds and concerns about failing, our group came in second for “Best Campaign” of the five groups in the class.
It took more than theoretical proven concepts and theories to even make a dent in the interpersonal communication skills of the non-graduating group members. It took the very unconventional approach of crying and sobbing to really actually make a change in the attitude and communication skills of the group members. Gouran and Hirokawa’s Functional Group Decision-Making Theory (Dainton and Zelley 2011) really did give us a guideline as to how to approach a problem and decision-making situations. Not only did it help us at the time, but the four functions of the theory has helped me throughout my college career until this day and in my professional career. Spangle and Moorhead’s (1998) Communication Competencies has also been a great guideline in my professional life as far as how to approach problematic situations and how to develop interpersonal communication skills. Fortunately, in the end all goals were accomplished and the campaign was successful.
References
Dainton, Marianne and Elaine Zelley. 2011. Applying communication theory for professional life; A practical introduction. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Publications, Inc.
Spangle, Michael and Jacqueline Moorhead. 1998. Interpersonal communication in organizational settings: Communication skills for business and professional success. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company
Sptizberg, Brian H. and William R. Cupach. 2011. Interpersonal skills. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.