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5.4 Building trust and confidence-Treating people with integrity, respect and empathy

Since the late nineteenth and through the twentieth century, and now in the early twenty first century authors argued that the function of leaders and management was to build and then reinforce understanding and agreement from all employees on how the organisation can achieve its goals. Planning has provided the major tools for stating the goals and communicating these to individuals at all levels within the organisation.

Basically, planning was viewed as the core communication process and served to enable management to align staff towards an agreed sense of purpose. Credibility and trust in management was based around delivering the plan. Individuals in the organisation were then able to apply a common reason or meaning in the performance of their roles to complete tasks.

Reading 3

Secretan, L (July 17, 2000), 'Spirit at work - Honey or Vinegar?', Industry Week, pp. 3-4. Available at http://www.industryweek.com
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Activity 11

Empathy includes the act of imaginatively entering into the experience of another person and understanding their situation, feelings and motives.

  1. What relevance does this have to interpersonal communication in the workplace?
  2. Consider the scenario narrated in this reading. Can you think of a service situation (involving an internal or external customer) that would have benefited from greater empathy?
  3. Surveys show that customers of call centres have less loyalty to the service provider than those using face-to-face means. List four reasons why empathy has been identified as an important contributing factor.
  4. List a communication solution that can address each or all of the problems you have identified where empathy may be lost during non-face-to-face service encounters.

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