The differences in communication patterns of men and women

Communication is the process by which information is exchanged between communicators with the goal of achieving mutual understanding (Osland, Kolb, Rubin, and Turner, 2007, p. 195). Effective communication does more than just convey information. Effective managers can use communication to keep employees informed and up to date on everything happening within the organization. Successful organizations understand that communication is the glue that holds an organization together. There are numerous causes of distortion that function as barriers to communication, such as poor relationships, lack of clarity, individual differences in encoding and decoding, perception, culture, silence, and direct versus indirect communication (Osland, Kolb, Rubin, and Turner, 2007). But there are times gender also influences how people encode communication.

Deborah Tannen highlighted some important insights into differences between men and women in terms of their conversational styles (Robbins & Judge, 2007). In particular, Tannen has been able to explain why gender often creates oral communication barriers. The essence of Tannen’s research is that men use talk to emphasize status, power, dominance, and independence, whereas women use it to create connection. According to Tannen, communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. Intimacy emphasizes closeness and commonalities. Independence emphasizes separateness and differences. Women speak and hear a language of connection and intimacy. Women as a group are more concerned with maintaining the relationship with the person to whom they are speaking. Women are more likely to aim for cooperation, and focus on seeking and giving confirmation and support. For many women, conversations are negotiations for closeness in which people try to seek and give confirmation and support, whereas for many men, conversations are primarily to maintain status in a hierarchical social order.

According to Robbins and Judge (2007), Men frequently complain that women keep on talking about their problem, and women criticize men for not listening. Actually when men hear a problem, they frequently assert their desire for independence and control by offering solutions. On the other hand, women view telling a problem as a means to promote closeness. The women present the problem to gain support and connection, not to get the man’s advice. Mutual understanding is symmetrical—it sets up men as more knowledgeable, more reasonable, and more in control. This contributes to distancing men and women in their efforts to communicate. Men are often more direct than women in conversation. Men often criticize women for seeming to apologize all the time, and consider this as a weakness because they interpret it as the women is accepting blame. Lastly, women tend to be less boastful than men, and take the other person’s feeling into account. However, men can frequently misinterpret this and incorrectly conclude that women are less confident and competent than she really is.

References

Kolb, D.A., Osland, J.S., Turner, M.E., & Rubin, I.M. (2007). The organizational behavior: Behavior reader (8th ed.). Upper River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Robbins, S. P. & Judge, T. A. (2007). Organizational Behavior (12th. ed.). New Jersey: Upper Saddle River, Pearson.

Tannen, D. (1990). You just don’t understand. Retrieved on June 6, 2010 from
http://www.homestar.org/bryannan/tannen.html.