Case Study: Communication Strategies for Motivating Staff

This essay examines the critical role of communication in motivating staff, using a case study of a pizza business where a manager's autocratic communication style led to an employee's lack of motivation and incomplete tasks. It highlights the essential components of effective communication, including two-way feedback, horizontal and vertical communication, and accurate encoding of messages. The analysis identifies barriers to communication, such as embarrassing or intimidating remarks, and emphasizes the positive correlation between effective manager-subordinate communication and employee motivation. The essay concludes that managers must communicate effectively to foster a sense of belonging, enhance productivity, and achieve organizational objectives. Desklib offers similar solved assignments and past papers for students.

10 February 2019
Human Resource Management
Motivating Staff

MOTIVATING STAFF 1
Communication constitutes to be one of the most vital functions of an organisation, as it
enables sending and receiving of information, with the aid of the spoken or written words
(Newman, 2015). It is significant to note that an effective communication strategy within
an organisation leads to the efficient collaborations and feedback driven by the clear
exchange of information, and building of a positive work environment. Morrow (2011),
further quotes that communication is essential to enhance staff morale, which further leads to
job satisfaction and retainment of employees. The following essay is aimed at analysing a
given situation in the lights of various components of communication. In addition, the
reasons for the lack of motivation in the employee would be identified which further led to
the task not being completed.
It is significant to note the following elements that form the communication process.
Communication is a two-way process, where the sender sends the message and the receiver
receives it. In order to make the communication process complete, it is essential that feedback
on the message sent is received to ensure that the message has been received correctly by the
recipient (Ruck and Welch, 2012). Further, communication can take place in various forms in
an organisation, such as horizontal and vertical. While horizontal communication is one,
where message flows between the colleagues, the vertical communication is where the
messages are exchanged between the managers and subordinates. Another primary essential
component of the communication channel is encoding. Encoding refers to the translation of
information into words, actions, and expressions. It is important that messages must be
encoded accurately to reach the intended information to a particular individual.
On application of the above principles of communication to the given case study, the
following points are noteworthy. Firstly, there exists a barrier to the transmitting and
encoding in the information. As the manager, Mr Greg Matheson asks an embarrassing
question to the employee Maureen, which made her intimidated and distracted from the
message that was being passed on to her. Such a comment resulted in a barrier to
communication on the part of Greg, without any real intention to do so, and therefore the
managers must avoid the same. Further, it is also evident that the leadership and
communication style of manager Greg is autocratic as the information was passed on in the
forms of orders without any feedback being taken, that whether the tasks to be done were
understood clearly by Maureen or not. The autocratic communication style is the chief reason
that has been identified in the given case study for the lack of motivation among the

MOTIVATING STAFF 2
employee. Further, as the manager failed to take the feedback of the instructions given, this
further led to a lack of responsibility and commitment on the part of the employee.
Thus, as per the discussions conducted in the previous parts, it can be concluded that there is
a positive correlation among the communication among the managers and subordinates and
the motivation among the latter. As communication is an essential managerial function, the
same smoothens various business operations such as preparation of reports, passing on
instructions and collaboration within the teams. It is concluded that it is the responsibility of
the managers to communicate effectively and efficiently with the employees to make them
feel part of the organisation, enhancement in their productivity and thus, fulfilling of the
organisational objectives.

MOTIVATING STAFF 3
References
Cooper, R. (2015) Information, communication and organisation: a post-structural revision.
In For Robert Cooper, UK: Routledge, pp. 124-148.
Morrow, S. V. (2011) Everything you need to know about the fundamentals of business
communication. Ontorio: Brain Mass Inc.
Newman, A. (2015) Business Communication: In Person, In Print, Online. 10th ed., Boston
MA: Cengage learning. p. 4.
Ruck, K. and Welch, M. (2012) Valuing internal communication; management and employee
perspectives. Public Relations Review, 38(2), pp. 294-302.