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Chapter Guides

This section provides information about the chapters in the textbook and suggested solutions and answers

for the activities. Each Chapter Guide includes the following items:

Part 1: Understanding the Foundations of Business Communication

The first three chapters give students a general understanding of why good communication skills are

important in business, how today’s communication is enhanced through technology (particularly the

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Chapter 1: Professional Communication in a Digital, Social, Mobile World

Chapter 1 emphasizes the importance of effective communication, explains what it means to

communicate in a professional context, describes the communication process model and the ways social

media are changing the nature of business communication, outlines the effects of the mobile revolution,

advises students on how to use communication technology effectively, and offers guidance for making

ethical choices as a business communicator.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Understanding Why Communication Matters

Communication Is Important to Your Career

Communication Is Important to Your Company

What Makes Business Communication Effective?

Communicating as a Professional

Understanding What Employers Expect from You

Communicating in an Organizational Context

Adopting an Audience-Centered Approach

Exploring the Communication Process

The Basic Communication Model

Barriers in the Communication Environment

Inside the Mind of Your Audience

How Audiences Receive Messages

How Audiences Decode Messages

How Audiences Respond to Messages

The Social Communication Model

The Mobile Revolution

The Rise of Mobile as a Communication Platform

How Mobile Technologies Are Changing Business Communication

Using Technology to Improve Business Communication

Keeping Technology in Perspective

Guarding Against Information Overload

Using Technological Tools Productively

Reconnecting with People

Committing to Ethical and Legal Communication

Distinguishing Ethical Dilemmas from Ethical Lapses

Ensuring Ethical Communication

Ensuring Legal Communication

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Learning Catalytics is a “bring your own device” student engagement, assessment, and classroom

intelligence system. It allows instructors to engage students in class with real-time diagnostics. Students

can use any modern, web-enabled device (smartphone, tablet, or laptop) to access it. For more

information on using Learning Catalytics in your course, contact your Pearson Representative.

LECTURE NOTES

Section 1: Understanding Why Communication Matters

Learning Objective 1: Explain the importance of effective communication to your career and to the

companies where you will work.

Communication Is Important to Your Career

Improving your communication skills may be the most important step you can take in your career.

Communication Is Important to Your Company

Effective communication helps businesses in numerous ways:

• A stronger sense of trust between individuals and organizations

• Closer ties with important communities in the marketplace

What Makes Business Communication Effective?

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Stakeholders are groups affected in some way by the company’s actions: customers, employees,

shareholders, suppliers, neighbors, the community, the nation, and the world.

Section 2: Communicating as a Professional

Learning Objective 2: Explain what it means to communicate as a professional in a business context.

If you don’t have a lot of work experience yet, meeting the expectations of a professional environment

might require some adjustment.

Understanding What Employers Expect from You

Today’s employers expect you to be competent at a wide range of communication tasks:

• Digital information fluency—recognizing information needs, using efficient search

techniques to locate reliable sources of information, and using gathered information ethically

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Communicating in an Organizational Context

In the formal communication network, ideas and information flow along the lines of command in

Adopting an Audience-Centered Approach

An audience-centered approach involves understanding and respecting the members of your audience

and making every effort to get your message across in a way that is meaningful to them.

Section 3: Exploring the Communication Process

Learning Objective 3: Describe the communication process model and the ways social media are

changing the nature of business communication.

The Basic Communication Model

By viewing communication as a process, you can identify and improve the skills you need to be more

successful:

• The sender has an idea.

Considering the complexity of this process, it should come as no surprise that communication efforts

often fail to achieve the sender’s objective.

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but it is valuable as a starting point to get students thinking about message encoding, transmission,

decoding, and feedback.

Barriers in the Communication Environment

Messages can be disrupted by a variety of communication barriers:

Everyone in an organization can help minimize barriers and distractions.

Inside the Mind of Your Audience

For an audience member to receive a message, the receiver has to:

• Sense the presence of a message

• Select it from all the other messages clamoring for attention

• Perceive it as an actual message

Five habits will increase the chances that your messages will be sensed, selected, and perceived:

• Consider audience expectations.

• Ensure ease of use.

• Emphasize familiarity.

• Practice empathy.

• Design for compatibility.

A received message doesn’t mean anything until the recipient decodes it and assigns meaning to it.

There is no guarantee that the receiver will assign the same meaning that the sender intended.

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Individual thinking styles affect message decoding.

Audience members will respond in the way you’d like them to if they:

The Social Communication Model

The basic communication model shows how a single idea moves from one sender to one receiver.

In a larger sense, it also helps represent the traditional nature of much business communication, which

was primarily defined by a publishing or broadcasting mindset.

In contrast to the publishing mindset, this new social communication model is interactive and

conversational.

Customers and other groups are now empowered through social media, which transform passive

audiences into active participants in the communication process by allowing them to share content,

revise content, and respond to content, or contribute new content.

The social communication model changes business communication in profound ways:

A hybrid approach is emerging in which some communications follow the traditional approach and

others follow the social approach.

Section 4: The Mobile Revolution

Learning Objective 4: Outline the challenges and opportunities of mobile communication in business.

Some experts predict that mobile communication will change the nature of business and business

communication even more than social media have.

The Rise of Mobile as a Communication Platform

Mobile is now the primary Internet-access technology for millions of people.

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Mobile has become the primary communication tool for many business professionals, including a

majority of executives under age 40.

Continuous, intimate mobile connectivity can start to resemble a continuous stream of conversations

How Mobile Technologies Are Changing Business Communication

Mobile necessitates some obvious changes in communication practices, such as the need to deal with

smaller screens and different input methods.

Many users expect websites to be mobile friendly, so many companies are adopting a mobile-first

approach in which they design to fit the needs of mobile users. This typically involves simplifying

screen designs and changing navigation controls to accommodate touch-based swiping maneuvers.

Other changes brought about by mobile are often deeper and sometimes more subtle:

• Mobile users expect to have immediate access to information and the ability to stay

connected to their various social and business networks.

• Constant or radical connectivity is a mixed blessing, as it can prevent people from

healthy disengagement from work.

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Section 5: Using Technology to Improve Business Communication

Learning Objective 5: List four general guidelines for using communication technology effectively.

Today’s businesses rely heavily on technology to facilitate the communication process.

To use communication technology effectively, you need to:

Keeping Technology in Perspective

Remember that technology is simply a tool—a means by which you can accomplish certain tasks.

Guarding Against Information Overload

The overuse or misuse of communication technology can lead to information overload, in which

people receive more information than they can effectively process.

Information overload makes it difficult to discriminate between useful and useless information,

lowers productivity, and amplifies employee stress both on the job and at home.

Using Technological Tools Productively

In the “information technology paradox,” information tools can waste as much time as they save.

Inappropriate web use not only distracts employees from work responsibilities, but can also leave

employers open to lawsuits.

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Knowing how to use tools efficiently can make a big difference in your productivity.

Managers need to guide and train their employees in productive use of information tools.

Reconnecting with People

Section 6: Committing to Ethical and Legal Communication

Learning Objective 6: Define ethics, explain the difference between an ethical dilemma and an ethical

lapse, and list six guidelines for making ethical communication choices.

Ethics are the principles of conduct that govern behavior within a society.

Ethical communication:

Examples of unethical communication include:

• Plagiarism

• Omitting essential information

The widespread adoption of social media has increased the attention given to the issue of

transparency.

Class discussion question: Have you ever contributed to “social media outrage” (using your social

media accounts to boost the anger about a contemporary issue by forwarding it, liking it, etc.) without

stopping to think who might’ve originated the message or what the originator’s motives might’ve

been?

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Distinguishing Ethical Dilemmas from Ethical Lapses

An ethical dilemma involves making a choice when the alternatives aren’t completely wrong or

completely right:

Ensuring Ethical Communication

To ensure ethical communication, three elements need to be in place and to work in harmony:

• Ethical individuals

Ethics audits monitor ethical progress and point out any weaknesses that need to be addressed.

Every employee has the responsibility to communicate in an ethical manner.

In the absence of clear guidelines, ask yourself the following questions about your business

communication efforts:

• Have I defined the situation fairly and accurately?

• What is my intention in communicating this message?

Ensuring Legal Communication

In addition to ethical guidelines, business communication is also bound by a wide variety of laws and

regulations, including the following areas:

• Promotional communication. Marketing specialists need to be aware of the many laws that

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• Employment communication. A variety of local, state, and federal laws govern

Class discussion question: Should companies be allowed to advertise to children who are too young

to make fully-informed choices? If there should be a cutoff age, what should it be and how would it

be enforced?

HIGHLIGHT BOX: THE FUTURE OF COMMUNICATION

The Internet of Things

Encourage students to view communication in its broadest sense. For example, digital devices and

systems might carry on a “conversation” among themselves that previously would’ve taken place between

HIGHLIGHT BOX: DIGITAL+SOCIAL+MOBILE: TODAY’S COMMUNICATION

ENVIRONMENT

It’s All Fun and Games—and Effective Business Communication

1. Refer students to the coverage of communication ethics in “Committing to Ethical and Legal

Communication.” They should conclude that gamification is ethical if it doesn’t distort or hide

2. Student answers will vary.

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COMMUNICATION CHALLENGES AT JETBLUE

Individual Challenge

Students should frame their responses using the discussion of effective business communication in “What

Makes Business Communication Effective?” and “Adopting an Audience-Centered Approach” from the

Team Challenge

Student answers will vary but they should take into consideration the standards of professional

communication discussed in the chapter. Students with limited work experience may not yet appreciate

TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE

1.1. Your communication skills will benefit you in the following ways:

• Promoting your ideas to colleagues, bosses, investors, and customers

And your communication skills will contribute to your company in the following ways:

• A stronger sense of trust between individuals and organizations

• Stronger decision making and faster problem solving

[LO-1] AACSB: Written and oral communication (See MyBCommLab for additional

insights)

APPLY YOUR KNOWLEDGE

1.11. Business is largely a matter of relationships and transactions, both of which are critically

1.12. The interactive nature of social media is an invitation for audiences to let their voices be heard in

1.13. Overuse of social media on the job can affect an employee’s ability to receive truly important

business messages because the volume of incoming messages can make it difficult to sense the

1.14. Students will learn more about writing and formatting messages for mobile devices in subsequent

chapters, but they can answer this question by using what they’ve learned in this chapter about

1.15. This situation is an ethical dilemma because it does not present one alternative that is clearly right

and one or more alternatives that are clearly wrong. Both options (informing employees now

about the possibility of a layoff or waiting until you are sure) have positive and negative elements

that can help or harm various stakeholders. For example, if you share the possibility of a layoff,

PRACTICE YOUR SKILLS

1.16. Message for Analysis

Students will recognize this document as ineffective because it presents so many barriers to effective

communication. The blog:

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• Creates emotional barriers right from the first sentence (accusing employees of lying and

cheating, later calling them names), preventing readers from perceiving the intended message

To revise the message, students should start by deleting all the information that isn’t necessary so that the

message can focus on the problem at hand and the potential consequences. To avoid starting with an

accusation, the message could start by reminding employees that accurate time records are a matter of

Exercises

1.17. Look for information about students’ majors, hobbies, likes, dislikes, and career plans. The email

1.18. This question provides a good opportunity to discuss the advantages and limitations of utilizing

social media for business communication, specifically the length limitations imposed by a

1.19. This exercise reveals how well students translate the chapter material into a practical analysis of

business communication—the first step to crafting more effective messages of their own. Look

1.20. In completing this exercise, students should recognize the often-significant differences between

1.25. Students should evaluate the websites using the criteria for effective business communication and

the discussion of the audience-centered approach. For example, a website that isn’t mobile

1.26. To improve the discussion that this exercise can generate, consider assigning different services to

1.27. Students should recognize that the boss’s request itself is potentially unethical, putting the

employee in a situation of policing his or her colleagues—which will surely lead to circumstances

in which the employee is forced to be disingenuous with colleagues (e.g., not saying anything to a

1.28. Here is a brief ethical assessment of each situation:

a. Keeping quiet about the possible environmental hazard would be an ethical lapse that could

possibly affect lives if not wildlife.

1.29. Students should be able to identify dozens of potential violations of Cisco’s Code of Conduct.

Three examples include: entering into or sustaining a business relationship that creates a conflict

of interest with an employee’s professional responsibilities at Cisco; providing financial

1.30. Critical thinking is an essential aspect of business communication because it involves the ability

to evaluate evidence completely and objectively in order to form logical conclusions and make

1.31. Mobile technology is changing business communication in multiple ways. Students’ answers

should include key points from the chapter:

• Mobile necessitates some obvious changes in communication practices, such as the need to

deal with smaller screens and different input methods.

• Many users expect websites to be mobile friendly, so many companies are adopting a mobile–