Abstract
Surveys of employers often list oral communication among the top skills employers seek when hiring (https://www.naceweb.org/about-us/press/the-key-attributes-employers-seek-on-college-graduates-resumes/).The term “oral communication” encompasses a wide range of behaviors, ranging from basic skills in listening and conversing to more advanced skills such as giving and receiving feedback, coaching, and negotiation (Kleckner & Butz, 2021; Ulinski & O’Callaghan, 2002). This issue of Management Teaching Review emphasizes those oral communication skills that are commonly taught in management courses, such as organizational behavior, leadership, teams, and negotiation. It provides seven resources that instructors can adopt to help students understand communication-related concepts, audit their own team communication skills, and develop the feedback, coaching, and negotiation skills needed by managers.
In the first of the five Experiential Exercises in this issue, Brenda Bailey-Hughes explains how students can observe, organize, and quantify their own small group communication behaviors in “A Communication Audit Exercise to Enhance Virtual Team and Individual Communication Skills.”
Two exercises address feedback skills. “The Appreciative Team Huddle: Real-Time, Best-Self Feedback in Student Teams” by Angela M. Passarelli is a peer-feedback exercise in which students give positive feedback to team members. It is complemented by Laura Paglis Dwyer’s exercise, “Turning the Table: Developing Students’ Skills in Receiving Feedback,” which develops skills in soliciting, receiving, and responding to feedback effectively.
“Developing Coaching Mindset and Skills” by Mark Cannon, Susan Douglas, and Deborah Butler provides a pair of coaching exercises to introduce, practice, and clarify the differences between remedial and developmental coaching.
The next exercise, “Can You Hear Me Now? The Communication Challenge” by Jeanie M. Forray and Melissa Knott, demonstrates how roles, perceptions, biases, power dynamics, and influence tactics influence organizational communications.
The next two articles address negotiation skills. First, “Negotiating Quality and Productivity: An Experiential Exercise” by Robert Reiter Albright II and Dale M. Finn is a one-on-one role-play of internal company negotiations based on a true case with a known outcome. Second, Stephen D. Risavy provides a process for instructing students to approach their first important negotiation with his Practice-to-Research Connections article, “Job Offer Negotiations: Helping Students Negotiate Their Job Offers.”
Finally, Mark Julien, Russell Clayton, and Micheal Stratton’s Resource Review, “Who’s on First: A Resource on Workplace Communication,” assesses two comedy routines as resources for teaching basic communications concepts.
If management students can develop this wide range of oral communication skills, they will surely be more likely to meet the expectations of future employers.