Managerial communication in the banking sector of pakistan management essay

The author LARRY E. PENLEY (1991) discussed about the communication competencies and its effects on performance of the managers for better communication. Communication competencies referred to communication skills. Different authors defined communication competencies according to their researches. Some considered manager’s performance created competencies. Other author suggested that communication depend on the choice of means either oral communication or written communication. A situation in which a manager communicated effectively without any anxiety and stress was the oral communication. Research showed that people with high oral communication apprehension avoid jobs that required high communication skills like teaching.

On the other hand, written communication was another mean of effective communication for other managers. The author stated that people with written communication apprehension try to keep away from the situation where writing was required. Most researches related to communication competencies had focused on the performance of the students in writing courses. Hypothesis generated in this study was managers with higher performance reveal higher levels of communication skills. Further, author also made a hypothesis that males and females will not differ in communication skill. Method used to study the subject was done under the methodology of gathering data from middle and upper level managers of banks. A questionnaire was floated and mailed to743 banking managers in state. MANOVA was used to test the hypotheses.

Results showed that efficiency in communication depend on the performance of the manager. Poor performing managers face difficulty in reporting information. In the same way, managers who did not posses writing skills, they do not perform or communicate well.

The author also concluded that the competencies associated with managerial performance of females and males and there difference in communication context. The female managers were less self-reported than male managers and it vice versa.

The writer JAMES SUCHAN (1990) stated that written communication plays an important role in the efficient communication in these days. The study of this article unfolded the efficiency of communication associated with the two writing styles, one was the high-impact style and the other was the traditional bureaucratic style. As the amount of information was increasing and becoming a huge snowball, the managers would be required to handle that amount of information and present it efficiently. In writing efficient communication, the organizations were required to use readable formulas. It was also found that the software designers who had analysis packages used those readability formulas to give a brief summary of the written documentation. So the main question of the research was based on whether the staff understands high-impact style or bureaucratic style. Second was related to understanding information stated in high-impact or bureaucratic style. So in order to understand and get answers to the questions, a survey was distributed to more than 262 naval officers and chief petty officers appointed at various orders. Respondents participated voluntarily so that element of seriousness remains present. The method of research was simple as half of the respondents were given high-impact style document and half of the respondents were given bureaucratic style document.

Further research had also proved that if the purpose of writing was mentioned in the first paragraph, it could help to improve communication and it decreased the reading time. Contract sentences also helped to improve communication because it stated all important points to be discussed in the document which created effective communication between the writer and the reader. In addition to this, adding title to the document gave the reader a meaning about the purpose of communication. It reduced the time on focusing on the main idea of the document and remained stick to the memory for a longer period of time. With this, adding heading, listings, bold print, and spacing increased the convenience of understanding the document.

The final findings of the research did in the articles showed that the high-impact style which included providing brief introduction in the first paragraph worked well for better communication and retained information. While the bureaucratic style included titles, heading, listings, spacing etc was less effective for communication.

The writer ANTHONY MULAC (2000) stated that the discriminating analysis indicated that there was a significant difference in language used by both genders in the organizations. The writer talked about the discrimination in terms of criticism by both genders. Researchers showed that expression depends on the relationship of the speaker and the listener. The main question of the research was to find out difference in the language used by men and female managers in role-playing. Second question was to find the influence of the sex coworkers while communication. There was also a question whether the gender of the coworker affects. So the researcher used these questions rather the any hypotheses.

The first question was answered by conducting a stepwise discriminant analysis. Results of this analysis showed that male and female and professional managers used different coded language in different ways. The results of discriminant analysis showed that there was no such relation of coworkers affects on genders managers. Although men were generally more direct in criticizing while communicating, women at higher positions were more direct then men when there was a difference in status and position. Women were found more concerning of the information that appeared to be connected to other persons. Men had different priorities, so they tend to put more importance on task goals. Further, the writer explained that women tend to focus on more emotional words in communication while men emphasized on references and judgmental adjectives. So at the end, it was also stated that if the communicators were not aware of the sex of each other, then there would be less influence of gender stereotypes.

Regression on different dynamics of men and women showed different results. In the results, men were rated higher on aggressiveness and power while women are rate higher on beauty and serenity. Results of discriminate analysis showed that male and female use different communication pattern. The style and position of the communicators also influence the communication process.

The author RONALD E. RIGGIO (2008) stated that emotional and social skills considered effective elements for communication between leaders and managers. The writer also mentioned that emotional and social skills were associated with higher quality relationship and more supportive social system. In the research, emotional skills were associated with investigation of nonverbal and emotional communication. Emotional skills were defined as ability to express, read and understand emotions. For that, emotional intelligence model was suggested for further study. Social skills were defined as the ability to think and act wisely in social intelligence. For studying this, social intelligence model was selected. Analysis from different case studies revealed that emotional intelligence and social intelligence had a positive relationship with the person, which meant that it had an effect on relationship of the leader or manger with the other person.

Other study of the research was related to the leader emotional senstivity is positively associated with the leader member exchange. Leader-member exchange theory suggested that because of the shortage of time and high pressure, the leader or the top managers could develop relationships with only a few of his key subordinates while developed a formal relationship with other subordinates and employees. The author stated that high quality working relationship created partnership and high degree of mutual positive effect which was referred to as CADRE. In this, the employee got greater chances of receiving superior support and guidance. On the other hand, low quality working relationships with the manager were just governed by their working contract. For analysis of these questions, Brief Affect Recognition Test and Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy Test were used to analyze some videos and photographs of the respondents.

Therefore, this relationship had a great impact on the communication among the different subordinates and superior subordinates. The higher the magnitude of interaction between the superior subordinate and subordinate the higher the chances of effective communication. Similarly, low interaction and communication means formal relationship, higher levels of supervisory from the employer side, low satisfaction and higher level of subordinate’s turnovers. The different test and analysis also indicated to more forms of relationships which were deduced from high quality relationship and low quality relationship. These were positive relationship communication and negative relationship communication. Positive relationship communication reflected more efficient communication which includes sharing of personal and office information. While negative relationship communication reflected a negative influence on the subordinates motivating towards inefficient work.

VICTORIA AND ALEXANDRA (1990) stated, a multi person, model driven experiment had been conducted to understand the influence of organization structure on organization performance and its decisions. Two organizational structures were used for the investigation: a parallel one and a hierarchical one. In the parallel structure, all decision makers DMs are at the same level of authority and they were working together in coordination. On the other hand, in the hierarchical structure, authority varied with the rank of the DMs.

The performance of the organization was measured in terms of its response time and accuracy. These two dimensions represented team performance. Moreover, the cognitive workload of decision makers during the execution of the task was estimated because bounded rationality imposed a limitation on the human’s capability for processing information. This study highlighted the two most important factors that affected organization performance. One the task attributes and the other was information processing and decision-making ability of the organization members. Task attributes changed the working condition while individual differences resulted in variability of organizational performance.

The study proved that individual difference had more influence on performance in the parallel organization than in hierarchical organization. It also verified that when available time decreased, time pressure was introduced in the organization and DMs had to adjust their processing rate.

The author MICHAEL J. GLAUSER (1984) talked about the flow of information in the hierarchy of the organization. There were several characteristics that supported in the flow of information and communication in the organization especially in the upward direction of the organizations. Majorly, that depended on the superior subordinate, the relationship of the subordinates with the superior-subordinate and most importantly the structure of the organization where decision was made either in hierarchical structure or parallel structure.

Upward communication generally included the primary forms such as information about the subordinate himself, it could be about the information of problems of other peers, or it could be information related to the policies and procedures. Increased flow of information and better communication led to these areas of information helped in effective decision making. But there were several factors that created hurdles in communication between the upper hierarchy and the lower hierarchy of the organization. Firstly, there were very few managers working at top positions that made it structurally difficult to pass information. Then these managers had limited cognitive capacity due to which they could pass only limited information. It had be found out that majority of the supervisor were not interested in upward communication. In this article, information was defined as all the type of messages sends to the employees and employers. Four articles were included for study. Research papers had been included in this article. Majority of the research were concluded that upward communications depend on the relationship of the supervisor and subordinates and the nature of the information floated in the hierarchy of the organization, structure characteristics. The author concluded by a model that resulted that efficient upward communication could be acquired by examining the characteristics of the relationship of the supervisor and subordinates, structure of the organization and the nature of the message.

Camella and Laura (2008) demonstrated the importance of efficient managerial communication. For developing a successful business it was essential to communicate and transfer information, decisions and at the same time to listen responses to those information. According to them, mangers were required to have all qualities that were necessary for managerial activities; the most important quality that the manger should have possessed was the quality to communicate efficiently. Due to the constantly changing environment of the business environment, the importance of managerial communication had increased.

He issued the questionnaire to 25 randomly selected managers from different organization and then he analyzed the importance of managerial communication. The questions were based on the important characteristics of managerial communication. The regression analysis was done to obtain the results. The following results were obtained;

Managerial communication was derived from organization framework where it was performed. The basic purpose of the communication was to sends relevant information to the employee of the organization and their responses had a great impact on manager’s decision and behavior. Every company should enhance the quality of its communication channel so that communication process can be done efficiently.

It was also proved that, efficient managerial communication required not only interpersonal communication skills within the company but also with the business traders outside the company. The study showed that, on one side manager needed all relevant information of employees regarding their goals and objectives and on other side, he also needed information of his employees with regard to the technical, social and economic issues of the company. Findings explored that managers acted as an agent of any company and he behaved for the well being of a company. Managerial communication acted as bridge between the members inside and outside the organization

BRIGET H. MUELLER AND JAESUB LEE (2002) stated in this article about the relationship of leader-member exchange and communication satisfaction. Quality of strong leader manager exchange had a positive relationship with efficient communication. Leader-member exchange theory was elaborated in the article that supervisors and leaders had limited amount of resources such as social, personal and organizational. Earlier researched stated that leader-member exchange affected communication between managers and employees in areas such as upward communication, decision-making, organizational justice and etc. so the hypothesis created was that the quality of LMX would affect the perceived amount of communication satisfaction in interpersonal contexts, employees with in-group relationships with their superiors would report the highest amounts of satisfaction with personal feedback and supervisory communication, those with middle-group relationships would report the next highest amounts, and those with cut-group relationships would report the lowest amounts. Similarly, other hypothesis created was that LXM would affect the perceived amount of information communication efficiency specifically in-group employees but vice versa with out-group employees.

The survey questionnaire was developed for testing hypotheses. And it was distributed among students of communication classes who had some experience of 6 months or more. Four nonprofit organizations were also included in the study. Results revealed that greater the LXM relation between the supervisor and subordinates, greater would be communication efficiency. Results of hypothesis 2 were also positive indicated that in-group employees had more communication satisfaction as compared to the out-group employees. The author concluded that however linkage of this relationship decreased as the sphere of influence became distant.

Balarin (2006) discussed about significance of manger-staff communication. The author focused on understanding the importance of communication in management. She believed that managerial communication acted as a knowledge power in any organization and was the major reason of a success of any company

The research questions that were addressed in this thesis were

(1)What is the role of manager and staff communication in the workplace? (2)What are the challenges/ factors of the work place that can impact managerial communication? (3)What is the impact of manger and staff relations on communication?

The methodology used for this thesis was based on the case study view of manger-staff communication process at a South African institute. The author had gathered information with the help of questionnaires and focus groups interviews to understand the whole process of managerial communication. The questionnaire was conducted to numerically understand all the trends and patterns regarding communication. It carried one question for those participants who were willing to participate further. She also used online questionnaire so that people could had easy access. Before questionnaire, she also conducted pilot study. Her unusual combination of questionnaire and interviews resulted in triangulation of data which increased the reliability of results. Questionnaires were distributed among 550 employees to discuss the managerial communications in detail.

Results showed that positive relationships at work place were the major cause of the success of organization. It showed that mangers that were more informal and were working in friendly working environment had better communication level. Findings also proved that mangers who knew more languages were more open to efficient communication. It had observed that the leaders who think ‘ we” as “ team” and who gave value to others are more efficient communicator. In addition to this, more communication channels including e-mail, telephones increased the efficiency of communication of that organization.

The research also proved some challenges that were impacting communication. The most important challenge was time. Findings showed that mangers who provided good time with supervisors to make them understand the policy, they were evaluated as having good communication skills. But the challenge was time management as time is the scarce resource for any manger. The second challenge was to control the stress. It had observed the mangers that were facing high stress from their working environment were less likely to interact and communicate with their sub-ordinates. The third challenge was motivation. Results also showed that those organizations who did not appreciate their mangers for communication resulted in ineffective communication.

Results also proved that companies with open door policy were enjoying more success due to effective communication. Moreover, learning about employee’s behaviors and use of technology were also very prominent factors for effective communication.

Alexandra (2009) suggested that communication in the workplace was very effective and beneficial in individual and organizational level and it also helped in creating proactivity in the subordinates. This paper was based on leadership style and their impact on managerial communication.

The author took employees from US non-profit corporations. Total of 431 employees were selected . out of which 282 were subordinates and 149 were mangers. He issued different questionnaires for both mangers and subordinates. Managers’ questionnaires were based on their behaviors, performances and several other control variables including leadership style, proactive behaviors and communication skills etc. All the questions were based on likert scale. On the hand, employees were required to rate their mangers on different items using 5-point Likert type scale. The author followed the least square regression analysis to find out the results.

Findings proved that leadership styles had great impact on the communication and the performances of the subordinates. The evidence proved that transformational leaders encouraged more participation in the work place and also they appreciated proactivity of employees. They were open to suggestions and encouraged good communication with the subordinates. . Findings also proved that transactional leaders were conservative as compared to transformational leaders. They only preferred to solve the problems with little suggestions. Therefore, these leaders had less communication skills and did not enhance the efficiency of the employees. Evidence suggested that laissez-faire leader was very conservative and they did not possess the quality of leaders including communication and encouraging subordinates.

MANGERIAL

COMMUNICATION

HIERARCHAL STRUCTURE

PARALLEL STRUCTURE

COMMUNICATION COMPETENCIES

EMPLOYEE RELATIONSHIP

NATURE OF INFORMATION

DECISION MAKING

COMMUNICATION TYPE

STYLE OF COMMUNICATION

GENDER DIFFERNCE

THEORATICAL FRAMEWORK