Question

What is the importance of interpersonal skills in the workplace? Is it possible to improve interpersonal skills? What are the challenges and opportunities for managers in using OB concepts? Please give examples form your personal experiences.

Answer 1

Answer) Interpersonal skills are extremely important in the workplace as poor interpersonal skills can lead to poor team coordination leading to disastrous results,consider for example,poor communication skills,suppose your teammate has poor communication skills and you asked them to convey message to manager that meeting between your team and a vendor team will not happen because vendor team 's manager has fell ill and they have aplogized for postponing the meeting,now your team mate passed this message to your manager that meeting will not take place as vendor team is not coming,message has completely different tone now,it looks arrogant from vendor 's side now,your manager will likely to get angrier and cancel any future meeting with this vendor,interpersonal skills can lead to a good employee not getting credit owing to his/her lack of interpersonal skills,poor interpersonal skills can lead to an embarrasing situation where everyone ends up thinking other person is doing the work while in reality no one ends up doing the work.It is difficult but possible to improve interpersonal skills,like in the above example your team mate could have recorded the message or taken down key points knowing very well they tend to miss important information,interpersonal skills can be developed only through interacting more and more with your colleagues and learning from someone who has good interpersonal skills.When we talk about challenges for managers in using organizational behaviour concepts,we are looking at difference between theory and practical,at times conditions are dynamic,people 's behaviours are dynamic and it is simply not possible to use concepts expecting machine like stimulated results,add to that it is difficult to gauge someone's personality even after many interactions or wrong interpretation can lead to wrong results,as with everything,with challenges comes opportunities,OB concepts gives managers an opportunity to implement system based changes in organization,at same time if they use this concepts well they can categorize their team members in different categories based on personality,area specialization and can get the best out of them,finally these concepts if not working properly also can help them identify why they are not working right,is there any problem in implementation or are they interpretating results wrong.

Coming to my own experiences,I would talk about experiences in luxury salon,where one of my team members was poor in interpersonal skills and would mostly be sitting away from team leading to him doing different analysis instead of what was asked and at times sending wrong analysis,owing to poor interpersonal skills,he would not look for other members' review before sending out analysis to all teams and end up ensuring the whole team to be reprimanded from CEO,another experience in the same place is of usage of OB concepts where my team manager put sales team in different teams based on their personalities and they were matched with similar personality client,so if someone was high on extraversion,they were send to a similar client,if someone was seen more oriented towards numbers,they were send to a client with a pitch based on numbers,such concept was adopted based on different types of personalities and it turned out to be a good innovation.

Answer is complete.Thank you!