Indian Journal of Business Management & Technology, ISSN 2319-5797, Volume 8, Number 1/2 (2021): 1 - 8
© Arya PG College (College with Potential for Excellence Status by UGC) & Business Press India Publication, Delhi
http://apcjournals.com, www.aryapgcollege.ac.in

Applied Communication Skills & Modern Business

Seema , Hemant Mishra and Dharmendra Singh
1 Assistant Professor, Department of Commerce
2 Assistant Professor, Department of Social Work
Guru Nanak Khalsa College, Yamunanagar (Haryana), India
3 IT. Engg. Moradabad (Uttar Pradesh), India
⃰ Email: seemajangra1981@gmail.com

Abstract

Reinforcement is a concept that appears as the main part of theory of operational psychology and is most relevant to writing and philosophy in American academic world. The applicability of the concept of reinforcement in understanding how we, as human communicators in social interaction, behave and develop is important within the overall communication field. The field of reinforcement application and behaviour modification has maintained a strong base in dealing with children with special educational and behavioural needs, as well as work in aberrant adult and child communication disorders. Relational frame theory may offer a more useful approach to the place of reinforcement in human communication. This paper will detail about the concept of reinforcement and its place in the social skills communication model

Keywords: Behaviorism, Language, Social Communication.

Introduction

The results of decades of international research will outline and support the relevance of understanding how to strengthen the understanding of how to play many important roles in learning to communicate effectively and in the competent use of communication in most of the modern ways we use. Reinforcement is a concept that appears as the main part of theory of operational psychology and is most relevant to writing and philosophy in American academic world. Skinner (1974) is an idealistic and creative scholar who in 20th century, have changed the way we think about behavior and life, but his stated goal of changing the world people live has never been fully successful. Most human social communication is oral, and a wide range of languages are used throughout the world. In each language, there are large number of words and terms full of praise and rewards which are obviously intended to be used as responses to other speakers, so they have a strong social strengthening effect in application of communication. Regardless of whether we agree with the behavioral analysis of theorizing and researching of reinforcement concepts, it is obvious that there are many examples of terms in our language that assumes that words of praise and encouragement have some positive meanings and positive effects.
General praise is not always reinforcing and terms such as ‘good boy/girl’ are general and may interplay with different attributional ideas and motivation in the hearer. Parental use of reinforcement in the development of conversation and social skill has always been a strong feature in most cultures, and current ‘good-parenting’ volumes attest to the use of selective praise and encouragement linked to child behaviour as evidence of best practice. Again, specific praise related to the individual child and the actions/behaviour being responded to results in better take-up and repetition of the behaviour.
Current theory of language teaching heavily emphasises the need for young students beginning school and in their early literacy and oracy years to be ‘scaffolded’ (that is supported and encouraged by a more skilled language user, be it parent, caregiver, or teacher) within the theoretically conceived ‘zone of proximal development’.
Such terminology and its implications for a social construction emphasis on all language development have been pervasive in most language-teaching texts and research in the past two decades. The implications of these theories do not necessarily support reinforcement ideology, and in some instances their advocates would take some offence at any such links, but the examples often cited include parental and teacher praise and encouragement in language that is clearly interpretable as contingent reinforcement-type feedback, rather than some neutral conversational interaction.
In business, the use and understanding of the impact of verbal reinforces in communication and management, as well as human resource management, has a well-established background. Even a brief perusal, for example, of websites advertising workplace and management courses in such areas as ‘interpersonal communication skills in the workplace’ will demonstrate the centrality of elements of reinforcement theory and application in handling effective communication practices across such diverse areas from ‘difficult staff at work’ to ‘effective productive employees’. Any reliable search engine on the World Wide Web will give results on each of the aforementioned terms as search words that will open up a myriad of websites.
As stated above, the applicability of the concept of reinforcement in understanding how we, as human communicators in social interaction, behave and develop is important within the overall communication field. Whether the current literature tends to offer alternative terms, such as praise and encouragement or response, is not the issue, as the underlying theory and conceptualization remain cogent. The specificity of the concept and its roots in operant psychology are not currently main stream in the literature, but strong elements of research and application of the ideas and principles are still evident with applicable results.
Reinforcement in the New Communication Media
In the second half of the twentieth century and into this millennium, the ‘new media’ have become essential and central to communication patterns in most modern and postmodern nations. The new media are heavily visual (even the cellular telephone is moving into a medium for more visual content), although multimedia elements are becoming more prevalent as time goes by. Included in this general category for the purposes of this discussion are email, web pages, interactive internet chat rooms, blogs, and the ubiquitous text message, photo, and other image services of the modern cellular telephone networks. Many of these media are used more by the younger generations and have a linguistic edge which is starting to emerge as almost a new dialect, or even a new language with standardized English short cuts and symbolic elements at times reminiscent of rebus symbols in early twentieth- century reading instruction in schools. Research into aspects of how these media are changing communication patterns and interactivity is emerging, and there will be much more to come in the near future.
What is interesting for the purposes of this unit is that the skill and use of reinforcement are easily identified when these modern-use media are investigated.
Most of the symbols which are so heavily used in cellular telephone messaging, for example, include various ways of praising or rewarding, or positively reinforcing comments and messages. These symbols include emotions, such as smiling faces and hearts, which may be attached to messages.
Similar symbols in various keystrokes combinations also are found in many emails, particularly between close friends who share the dialect. It is important in this set of considerations, however, to differentiate the use of some of the media from among the remainder, in terms of the extent of interaction with a device that is a mediator of communication between two people, as compared to the situation where the computer or device is programmed in a way that appears to be non- mediating and has some apparent stand-alone qualities. Arguments for thinking computers, chaos theory, memetics, and the emergence of nanotechnology and devices with inbuilt elements of ‘fuzzy logic’ are starting to make the science fiction computer with a mind of its own a closer possibility than previous generations would have imagined.
Direct synchronous communication in which both parties are device connected in real time is one clear case of mediation, and the communication device is just a filter or medium between normal face-to-face encounters with all the attendant issues that may generate. There has been a long history of this type of communication through the development and use of the telephone, and many of the modern devices have merely extended this into a range of social and time and distance dimensions as a development of that paradigm. The advent of telephone etiquette, and specific language patterns of greeting, answering and conversation punctuation, enhancers, and inhibitors, has been the subject of considerable work over many decades. Asynchronous communication (where the parties are operating in different time spheres or zones but still communicating) is something which used to be only in the domain of letter writing but now also happens through email and various discussion forums and other interactive patterns.
Different from both of these situations is the computer as a programmed teaching or interactive device. Here the communication may have a range of interactive elements that allow different responses and ‘conversations’ or interactions to happen, depending on an algorithm or sequence which has been built into a program within the device. Some of the modern versions of such communication packages at their crudest level are the telephone- answering systems in which the caller punches in a number for a specific submenu service. The rigidity of this simplest ‘voice-mail jail’ version has become a modern social curse, and it is the subject of many a complaint.
The latter may often have built-in tests and progress checks with planned reinforcement schedules and social reinforcement comments in voice or text. Early research in this area seems to indicate that computer text criticism, for example, is quite powerful in its effects on motivation and recall. This field is ripe for additional detailed research and development.
At this stage of the unit, it is important to consider that these modern media and their implications for communication theory and research are where the leading edge will be for the first half of this millennium. Whether reinforcement, as a conceptual framework, has a large place in this development and in the study of how and why and in what ways people interact with machines, and how the human communications are or are not mediated by devices, will be a fascinating aspect to watch. There is no doubt that early work in programmed instruction and computer-mediated instruction, for example, suffered from a too heavy dose of behaviourist-dominated approaches emphasizing small sequenced parts as the basic learning paradigm, and that this has led to a vigorous search for alternative theories and approaches.
Concept of Communication Reinforcement
This unit now moves to suggest that, in order to understand clearly the way reinforcement figures in human social communication, the concept of communication reinforcement may be a useful way to discuss and analyse the application of operant theory and models of communication. Communication reinforcement refers to the consequences of a communication from one person to others which increases the likelihood of further communication happening.
The consequences of the emitted communication may be positive reinforcement in the form of social reinforcers, such as praise and other positive responses, and may be verbal or non-verbal, as with nods, facial expressions, or other gestures of approval or support.
Manipulation of Communication Reinforcement in Research and Therapy
Early research into the place and application of reinforcement theory in human communication emphasised the way positive reinforcement could be used in a deliberate sense to alter language behaviour and usage. Such research began in areas such as using reinforcement in increasing conversation skills and frequency, as, for example, in ‘delinquent girls’ or socially isolated elderly men in an institutional setting. There has always been considerable discussion of the linked (contingent) use of praise and reward by parents in assisting their children to develop language and social skills.
The field of reinforcement application and behaviour modification has maintained a strong base in dealing with children with special educational and behavioural needs, as well as work in aberrant adult and child communication disorders. Speech-delayed, aphasic, and autistic children have been assisted by these techniques, based on the operant theories of language and reinforcement connections in the UK, where autistic children are taught by applied behaviour analysis (ABA) techniques featuring reinforcement.
In various places and writing across the broad field of operant psychology and its many variants, terms such as ‘applied behaviour analysis’, ‘behaviour therapy’, and other variations distinguish the many approaches to utilising reinforcement concepts and practices to affect human behaviour and communication patterns. While these may have differing elements and emphases, they all have the concept of reinforcement as central and the application of it as the major means to change or adapt behaviour and language. Within this field, a recent development is functional communication training (FCT), and a number of studies have utilized this set of techniques, which use reinforcement to improve communication in children and some adults who demonstrate severe dysfunctional behaviour.
The basic approach of FCT involves an initial functional analysis of the behaviour that is seen as an issue (be it a misbehaviour or a lack of communication). The reinforcers that apparently currently support that behaviour are also noted in this stage. The next step is to organise for the child a new or different behaviour (it may be a simple oral statement or use of some communication cards if the child cannot yet verbalise). The significant interactors with the child (or adult) concerned then actively reinforce the new behaviour/communication each time, the child exhibits it. The latter behaviour/communication is termed a replacement behaviour for the previously unacceptable behaviour.
Applications of Communication Reinforcement in Various Fields
In addition to the above specific application of reinforcement and the operant model of psychology to learning and language aspects, there have been a number of related and derivative
developments which have emerged over the past two decades, and which are currently bringing
some new light to the applicability of reinforcement ideas and their relationship to human communication and behaviour. Two aspects which have developed in this vein are cognitive behaviour therapy and, more recently, relational frame theory.
Cognitive behaviour therapy is an approach with direct roots in Skinnerian thinking and operant psychology. This approach blends both cognitive therapy, which was pioneered by the psychologists The use of language and reinforcement is involved in such aspects of treatment of behavioural problems as the use of ‘self-talk’ and reinforcement of appropriate thinking about the behaviour. Cognitive behaviour therapy does not, like other therapies, seek to delve into the unconscious mind, as in more psychodynamic models, and tries to treat the faulty individual schemas and behaviour with specific reinforcement approaches common in behaviour-modification approaches. Cognitive behaviour therapy seeks to treat people with communication and social behaviour disorders and maladaptive behaviour, and, as such, is an attempt to bring the reinforcement concept into a modern approach whereby better human communication and behaviour can be assisted in such contexts.
There is a good deal of research and writing on this therapy concept and its applicability to language and behavioural disorders. The second major recent development that has been developed from the Skinnerian operant basis, in what is termed a post-Skinnerian approach, is relational frame theory. This is a recent and potentially powerful approach that argues for a new and different perspective on the way human language is discussed from a behaviourist point of view.
Relational frame theory maintains that there is a place for contingencies of reinforcement in the traditional operant sense, but the basic text and theory exposition is set up as a critique of Skinner’s original text, verbal behavior, and as such attempts to take the field beyond the Skinnerian views. The field of relational frame theory is emerging as one that has inspired a good deal of recent research and controversy as well.
The emergence of relational frame theory as a new paradigm with some promise is not doubted so much by writers. Relational frame theory may offer a more useful approach to the place of reinforcement in human communication.
Conclusion
It can be concluded that the field of reinforcement application and behaviour modification has maintained a strong base in dealing with children with special educational and behavioural needs, as well as work in aberrant adult and child communication disorders. Speech-delayed, aphasic, and autistic children have been assisted by these techniques. There have been a number of related and derivative developments which have emerged over the past two decades, and which are currently bringing some new light to the applicability of reinforcement ideas and their relationship to human communication and behavior.
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