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Reconceptualizing Social Skills in Organizations: Exploring the Relationship between Communication Competence, Job Performance, and Supervisory Roles

June 27, 2005 

"As organizational structures flatten and transformational leadership styles are fostered, corporate demand for employees skilled in interpersonal communication is on the rise.  Organizations are working to recruit, promote, develop, and train transformational leaders who connect with employees emotionally and have verbal and coaching skills (Bass, 1999, 1990).

Recognizing that communication competence is multifaceted researchers of employee communication competence should develop comprehensive conceptual definitions.  Organizational communication competence is the judgment of successful communication where interactants' goals are met using messages that are perceived as appropriate and effective within the organizational context.  Communication competence in organizations involves knowledge of the organization and of communication, ability to carry out skilled behaviors, and one's motivation to perform competently.

Although researchers have investigated communication competence or social skills in organizations, obvious gaps exist in the research.  One substantial issue is the lack of adequate measurement instruments operationalizing the construct in organizations.  A second, more substantial gap in the literature is the lack of clear conceptualization of competence incorporating affective cognitive, and behavioral elements.

Spitzberg and Cupach's relational model (1984; 1989) incorporates personal components - knowledge, motivation, skill, and contextual components - patterns of interaction, norms and rules, relationships types, setting, and activities.  Both personal and contextual components are essential to understanding the attribution of competence in organizations and the outcomes of such judgments.  The competent communicator possesses certain motivations, knowledge, and skills.  Second, in order to achieve communication goals, individuals must have knowledge to construct action plans, often refereed to as communication scripts (Berger, 1997).  The third component, skill, encompasses the actual performance of behaviors.  This is often the difficult part for communicators - turning the motivation and plan into action.

Many existing measures of competence are global in nature making the identification of the most essential skills for managers unclear (Penley et al., 1991).  Eight overlapping skill sets emerge in the literature as important to the competence construct, which can be extended to the organizational setting: listening (Haas & Arnold, 1995; Sphere, Bostrom, & Seibert, 1989), empathy, attentiveness (Cegela, 1981), usage or articulation (Duran & Kelly, 1988), altercentrism (Spitzberg & Hurt, 1987), interaction management (Wiemann, 1977), and adaptability (Duran, 1992).  First, listening and listening-related skills have often been examined in the competence literature and to a lesser extent within organizational contexts.  Listening involves cognitive as well as behavioral processes in acquiring information (Bostrom, 1996).  Other-orientation is often referred to a altercentrism, demonstrated by showing interest in and attention to others in conversations and adapting messages accordingly (Martin & Rubin, 1994).  Interaction management includes fluency, verbal ability, and social adaptability (Wiemann, 1977).  Adaptability is the ability to perceive relationships and adapt messages accordingly (Duran, 1992).

Several organizational outcomes have been connected to communication ability including upward mobility, job level, pay (Haas & Sypher, 1991; Sypher &Zorn, 1986), managerial performance (Bednar, 1982; Penley et al., 1991), leadership ability (Flauto, 1999), and productivity with new technology (Papa & Tracy, 1988).  H1: Employees with high levels of job performance will have higher levels of communication motivation to communicate, knowledge of communication, and communication skill than employees with moderate and low levels of job performance.  H2: Supervisors will have higher levels of communication motivation, knowledge of communication, and communication skills than nonsupervisors.  H3: Employees in supervisory positions with high levels of job performance will have higher levels of communication motivation, knowledge of communication and communication skill than supervisors with moderate and low levels of job performance.

Assessing and measuring competence within context is an important assumption of the relational approach; therefore, finding a sample organization and measuring employee competence as judged by the supervisor adds to the ecological validity of this study.  The population consisted of approximately 1,329 technical and clerical employees of the Information Technology Division of a large health care management corporation.  Employees were asked to complete the online survey.  Company representative manually matched supervisors and employees using the company's database and current organizational chart.  The second phase of data collection resulted in 199 matched employee and supervisor responses.  The mean age of the participants was 40, with an average length of service of 7 years.  Education levels were high, with 12% having associates/technical degrees, 44% with bachelor's degrees, and 22.5% with either graduate coursework or master's degrees.  In terms of gender, 58% were male and 42% were female.  Ethnically, 93% of the sample was Caucasian with the remaining 6% spanning six other ethnicities.

The skill scale has three dimensions: empathy, adaptability, and interaction management.  The scale measures an employee's actual communication skill level as judged by a supervisor because supervisors exert the most influence on evaluations of job performance.  The motivation component is conceptualized as one's willingness to approach or avoid communicative interactions.  The instrument was composed of 27 items and designed using a self-report format for employees to indicate their levels of motivation to communicate in the workplace.  The next major component of the competence model is knowledge.  A knowledge instrument was created based on communication scenarios in the workplace.  Questions were generated addressing the three major dimensions of competence pinpointed in this research: empathy, adaptability, and interaction management.  Using several examples from the organizational behavior literature (Pettit et al., 1997; Goris et al., 2000; Scudder & Guinan, 1989), a five-item scale was developed to measure job performance.  This research investigates the relationships between levels of job performance for employees and supervisors and communication competence employing multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) to test the hypotheses.

There was mixed support for the hypotheses concerning the main effects of job performance level and supervisory roles on the components of communication competence and no support for the hypothesis predicting an interaction between job level and job performance on motivation, knowledge, and skill.  Hypothesis 1 addressing the level of job performance and communication competence was partially supported.  Partial support was also found for Hypothesis 2 predicting a main effect of holding a supervisory position on motivation, knowledge, and skill.  Hypothesis 3, predicting an interaction effect for job performance and job level on motivation, knowledge, and skill was rejected.

The primary findings of this research indicate that high performing employees were motivated to adapt their communication and were more skilled at communicating empathy, adapting their communication, and managing interactions than lower performing employees.  Interestingly, low performing employees were more knowledgeable about how to communicate empathy than higher performing employees.

This research provides interesting implications for future study of communication competence in organizations but some limitations warrant examination.  First, using a single sample organization to test the model is sufficient; however, different companies have different rules of communicating, or different criteria for evaluating the appropriateness or effectiveness of communication.  Second, although exploratory in nature, external validity was not investigated in this research.  Finally, researchers should consider applying competence models to groups and organizations, which Jablin and Sias (2001) suggest is an often neglected area of research (Payne, 2005, p. 63-77)."

Reference:  Payne, H.J. (2005).  Reconceptualizing social skills in organizations: Exploring the relationship between communication competence, job performance, and supervisory roles.  Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, 2005, Vol. 11, No. 2.

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Created: 2007-08-28, Updated: 2009-02-17