Communication is a process of giving information, sharing thoughts and news, exchanging meanings and keeping contact with another person.
Good communication consists in such a way of speaking and listening that leads to changes in our partner’s perception, their emotions and attitudes. Communication is frequently divided into verbal and non-verbal, one-way and two-way, as well as formal and informal. All these issues are explained in greater detail below, in the description of communication models.
Communication, as a form of transmitting and exchanging information between people, can have a one-way or two-way character. The one-way type of communication takes place in a situation when one person sends information and the other does not send any feedback – this is what we call informing, while in two-way communication there is feedback, that is the receiver answers the message of the sender. The latter case is an example of good verbal communication, when the listener has a possibility to comment the given message. Of course, when it comes to projects and teams, such a form of mutual interaction is recommended to be frequently used.
In the literature, there are many theories relating to the social communication .
In Shannnon’s model (the first one-way transmission model of communication) every source of information requires a transmitter, which will be used to encode the message. In contrast, the receiver must give the understandable message for purposes (decoding). In this model, there are five elements - information source, transmitter, channel, receiver and purpose. Limitations of this model is that the feedback is not taken into account (which can modify both the message and the communication situation) and ignore the quality of the content. Development of this model was a Laswell’s model, according to which the essence of social communication is the answer for the following sequence of questions - who ? what says? what channel ?to whom ? and with what result?
Other models are Schramm’s linear and field of experiments model and Schramm-Osgood’s circular model. The linear model is equivalent to the Shannon’s model, in which the transmitter and the receiver are replaced by encoder and decoder. The communication process according to Schramm is effective, if the source has understandable information, the encoder represents the clear message in clearly transmitted characters, the signal is retransmitted quickly and accurately, the message is decoded in accordance with its encoding and the purpose is properly managing the decoded message with the opportunity to ask the source about the answer. On the other hand, the field of experience model highlights the contribution made into the communication process through communication source / encoder and the target / decoder, so called their field of experience (knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and ideas).
The last model, the Schramm-Osgood’s model basic premise of effective communication is a continuous exchange of messages between the source and the target (the model is circular). The model assumes that the return message can take the form of feedback or formal return to previously occupied space. This feedback may take the form of - verbal expression, applause, written expression or body movement (tone of voice, facial expression, etc.)