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conveying emotions, and can involve storytelling and crucial conversations.
Written communications have the advantage of asynchronicity, of reaching
many readers, and are best for conveying information. Both verbal and written
communications convey nonverbal messages through tone; verbal

communications are also colored by body language, eye contact, facial
expression, posture, touch, and space.
EXERCISES
1. When you see a memo or e-mail full of typos, poor grammar, or
incomplete sentences, how do you react? Does it affect your perception of the
Sender? Why or why not?
2. How aware of your own body language are you? Has your body
language ever gotten you into trouble when you were communicating with
someone?
3. If the meaning behind verbal communication is only 7% words, what
does this imply for written communication?

12.4 Communication Channels
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1. Understand how communication channels affect communication.
2. Recognize different communication directions within organizations.
The channel, or medium, used to communicate a message affects how
accurately the message will be received. Verbal, written, and nonverbal
communications have different strengths and weaknesses. In business, the decision to
communicate verbally or in written form can be a powerful one. In addition, a smart
manager is aware of the nonverbal messages conveyed by either type of
communication—as noted earlier, only 7% of verbal communication comes from the
words themselves.
Information Richness
Channels vary in their information richness. Information-rich channels convey
more nonverbal information. As you may be able to guess from our earlier discussion
of verbal and written communications, verbal communications are richer than written
ones. Research shows that effective managers tend to use more information-rich
communication channels than less effective managers. The figure below illustrates
[1]
the information richness of different information channels.
Figure 12.15 Information Richness

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