Do you – or your employees – feel anxious or fearful about speaking at work? Are there some situations when it feels more difficult than others? Do factors like gender, age, managerial status, and/or race / ethnicity have an influence? Find out about the latest research on these issues.
Employees are increasingly encouraged to be themselves at work; i.e. to be authentic. Yet recent organisational psychology research, which examined the impact of being yourself on workplace relations and task performance, has sounded a note of caution, questioning whether it is wise in all contexts.
Part 3 of a three part series on Context and Culture. In Part 1 and Part 2 we focused on the interactional context – the setting that a communication event takes place in. In fact, the interactional context is just one layer of context. Here I explain the other three levels of context and use a published case study to show how interconnected the levels are.
In this Part 2 of the series, we present a framework for understanding the key features of the interactional context as a whole. Communication always takes place in a particular setting. Many features of these settings can be summarised into the notion of a communicative activity that is recognised by others as having a set of familiar features.
Part 1 of a three-part series.
When people think of culture and its impact, their minds often turn to national differences and ask questions like “How do I deal with people from X country?” or “Why are people from X country so loud (or so quiet)?” In this series of GPC Insight pieces, I’ll be focusing on how such questions fail to consider the role of context.