Janes1

McKenzie Janes
October 14, 2015
B-Com Midterm

2. The definition of assertiveness is the ability to communicate the full range of your
thoughts and emotions with confidence and skill. This means that being assertive is the balancing
point between passive and aggressive and it is the best mode of communication to use. When it
comes to communicating with other people you cannot be too passive or too aggressive because
in both situations you have someone who wasnt thought of. When you are being too passive
youre the one being left out because your opinions are being shared. When youre too
aggressive though its the opposite only your opinions are being shared or taken into account
while others are left in the dirt. The balance between the two is what being assertive is about. For
an example telling your boss I like working here and will continue to work as long as Im
treated fairly. This comes off as aggressive and like youre accusing him of treating you
wrongly VS something along the lines of if you continue to treat me unfairly I will be forced to
quit this would be considered assertive because your thoughts are being brought up and youre
giving your boss the opportunity to fix things before it gets out of hand.
When balancing power you can either use competent communication or incompetent
communication. Competent communication is when you engage in communication with others
that is perceived to be both effective and appropriate in a given context. In order for there to be
competent communication there has to be an equal distribution of power. If the distribution of
power is uneven two things happen. One is defiance where the low-power personal purposely is

Janes2

noncompliant in order to get back at the person who has more power. Or more often than not
resistance, the low-power personal is defiant towards the person with more power because of the
resentment they feel. Both situations lead to incompetent communication. The balance of power
is the key to competent communication just like assertiveness is the balancing point between
passive and aggressive. The two are connected because you need to be assertive in order to get
the power that creates a competent communication.
4. The Interactive Model of Communication Theory states that communication is not all
one sided and to be able to communicate you need feedback from someone else. With each
interaction there is a receiver and a sender. The receiver listens to the information, there for
receiving it, while the sender sends the information to the receiver by communication. Being a
receiver does not mean that you sit there twiddling your thumbs during the entire conversation
however, instead it means that during certain intervols of the conversation you switch roles and
become the sender like when someone asks for an opinion and you begin to give them feedback.
Its explains in the book as a constant channel. The sender passes along a message that needs to
be decoded by the receiver. The receiver then has to send feedback about the previous message
which makes the sender the receiver now. See how the roles are reversed once a message is
passed? Thats how the Interactive Communication Theory is used correctly. The Interactive
Model of Communication is probably the most important theory of communication. Its basically
about feedback and if you think about it nothing would change or get better without feedback
because you would be doing the same thing over again whether its good or bad. Take a project
as an example if you do bad on a project and get no feedback or grade then how will you be able
to properly prepare yourself for a quiz or test? You may do exactly what you did on the project
without knowing that maybe you bombed the project so now you bomb the test as well.

Janes3

5. In Tannens Cant We Talk? she explains the difference between men and women
when they communicate. She recognizes that males and females communicate differently
because of how their roles in society. She states that men usually try to gain status through
communication while women look for support more often than status. The author used her own
marriage as an example. Her and her husband had jobs in two different cities and whenever she
answered questions about the arrangement she accepted sympathy from others and would talk
about the good as well as the bad. Her husband on the other hand would get irritated from the
sympathy being directed towards him and explain about all the pros the arrangements have. For
her the sympathy was sweet and kind of others while for him it was pity and a chance for
someone to be superior because they didnt have difficult arrangement with their significant
other like he did.
You cannot lump all men and women together but for the most part men are shown as the
stronger more aggressive gender while women are more passive. Men want to feel superior, the
alpha male, and more important than others while females tend to group together and look for
support from each other. Since women are also seen as the softer gender there are differences
with how they bring things up because men want more hard evidence and information while
women tend to talk about their feelings more. Because of the vast differences between how both
genders approach different situations in terms of communication there are blockers and
difficulties with how things are perceived from both. Either way this just helps with creating the
stereotype we live with, that shows male as dominant or more independent than women are.
6. In 2001 a third deep structural value on the intersection of gender and cultures was
identified by Hofstede. He called it the masculine- feminine dimension where cultures are
described as either masculine or feminine. Masculine cultures were discovered as having traits

Janes4

that represent male dominance such as assertiveness, competitiveness, the need to achieve and
the drive to do so. Masculine cultures are also less likely to compromise with others and will
instead be quicker to jump to a disagreement or war than those countries described at feminine.
Japan is an example of a masculine culture; most of the people in power are men and most of the
jobs available are part of the corporal world plus the gender roles are very distinct. The men have
more power than the women do, this is well known. Feminine cultures are described as more laid
back than masculine ones. The gender roles overlap one another, competition isnt dominant and
equality between the genders is more common. The jobs are less corporal and, you do not see
managers ordering their workers around but instead they ask and make suggestions. There is a
chart in the book that shows where on a scale countries land between feminine and masculine.
The United States rank as number fifteen on the scale between highly masculine and highly
feminine. That means that we arent fully masculine but we are more masculine than we are
feminine. This makes sense because men are still being paid more than women are in the
working world and sometimes we are quick to jump to war or jump in when we think a situation
needs to be changed. Not to mention most of our representatives throughout the years have been
male.