Business Communication Essentials 5th Canadian Edition by Courtland L Bovee test bank

Provide practical information.
Give facts rather than vague impressions. Use concrete language, specific detail, and information that is clear, convincing, accurate, and ethical.
Present information in a concise, efficient manner.
Clarify expectations and responsibilities.
Offer compelling, persuasive arguments and recommendations.
Diff: 1     Type: ES     Page Ref: 5
Objective:  1-1
 
112) How can businesses adopt an audience-centric approach to their communications?
Answer:  When business professionals take an audience-centred approach to their communication, they focus on understanding and meeting the needs of their audiences. Providing the information your audiences need is obviously an important part of this approach, but it also involves such elements as your ability to listen, your style of writing and speaking, and your ability to maintain positive working relationships. Another important element of audience-centred communication is etiquette—the expected norms of behaviour in a particular situation. Respect, courtesy, and common sense will help you avoid etiquette mistakes.
Diff: 1     Type: ES     Page Ref: 8-9
Objective:  1-2
 

113) Why is decoding a message such a complex process?
Answer:  The ability to extract meaning is influenced by culture, experience, learning and thinking styles, hopes, fears, and even temporary moods. Audiences tend to extract the meaning they expect to get from a message, even if it is the opposite of what the sender intended. In fact, rather than extracting the sender's meaning, it is more accurate to say that receivers re-create their own meanings from the message.
Diff: 1     Type: ES     Page Ref: 10
Objective:  1-3
 
114) Is the social communication model a more audience-centric approach to business communication than the basic communication model? Why/why not?
Answer:  Yes. The ability to listen and the ability to maintain positive relationships are important elements of the audience-centric approach. The social communication model, with its emphasis on interaction, conversation, and participation, facilitates this better than the "we talk, you listen" approach of the basic communication model. In the social communication model, the audience members are no longer passive recipients of messages but active participants in a conversation. Social media have given customers and other stakeholders a voice they did not have in the past. People can add to a conversation or take pieces from it, depending on their needs and interests, and this reflects an audience-centric approach.
Diff: 3     Type: ES     Page Ref: 8-10
Objective:  1-3
 
115) What are the disadvantages of the social communication model?
Answer:  Potential problems of the social media model include information overload, fragmented attention, information security risks, distractions that hurt productivity, and the blurring of the line between personal and professional lives, which can make it difficult for people to disconnect from work.
Diff: 1     Type: ES     Page Ref: 11
Objective:  1-3
 
116) Discuss the variety of ethical pitfalls that a company can encounter and why it is important to avoid them.
Answer:  Some of the ethical pitfalls that companies have to deal with include plagiarism, omitting essential information, selective misquoting, misrepresenting numbers, distorting visuals, and failing to respect privacy and information security. It is important that companies avoid these ethical lapses because communication is the public face of a company and is subject to particularly rigorous scrutiny.
Diff: 1     Type: ES     Page Ref: 15
Objective:  1-5
 

117) Explain the concepts of transparency in business communications, giving an example.
Answer:  In the context of business communication, transparency refers to a sense of openness, of giving all participants in a conversation access to the information they need to process the messages they are receiving. A major issue in business communication transparency is "flogs" ("fake blogs") which refers to employees posing as independent consumers and posting positive comments about their company's products.
Diff: 2     Type: ES     Page Ref: 15
Objective:  1-5
 
118) Distinguish between ethical dilemmas and ethical lapses, giving appropriate examples for each.
Answer:  An ethical dilemma involves choosing among alternatives that aren't clear-cut. Perhaps two conflicting alternatives are both ethical and valid, or perhaps the alternatives lie somewhere in the gray area between clearly right and clearly wrong. Unlike a dilemma, an ethical lapse is a clearly unethical (and frequently illegal) choice.