1.5 Chapter Summary and Exercise

Human relations is an important part of our career success. It is defined as relations with or between people, particularly in a workplace setting. Because a company depends on good human relations throughout its organizational structure, developing these skills is important.

Technology has greatly impacted human relations because so much of our communication occurs without the advantage of seeing body language. This can result in miscommunications. Many workers telecommute to work. There are advantages and disadvantages, a more notable disadvantage being the lack of human, face-to-face contact.

There was an evolution in human relations study. In the classical school of management, the focus was on efficiency and not on human relations.

Employees began to unionize in the 1920s due to a lack of positive human relations, and therefore the behavioral school of management was created. During this time period, researchers began to focus on the human relations aspect of the workplace. One of the major theories developed was the Hawthorne effect, which determined that workers were more productive when they were being watched and cared about by researchers.

During the 1950s, the behavioral science approach looked at management techniques as a way to increase productivity and human relations.

In the 1960s and beyond, sophisticated tools allowed researchers to analyze more data and focus on the statistical aspects of human relations and management data.

Personality is defined as a stable set of traits that can explain or predict a person’s behavior in a variety of situations. Our personality affects the way we interact with others. Our personality comes from both environmental factors and some factors we are just born with (nature).

The four main human relations skills include: communication, empathy, stress management, and conflict resolution.  

Values are the things we find important to us. If our values conflict with another’s, there may be a miscommunication or other issues.

Attitudes can be favorable or unfavorable feelings toward people, things, or situations. Our attitudes have a great impact on each other. If one person has a bad attitude, it is likely to be contagious. We can do many things to change our attitude, but they all include making a conscious effort to be aware of our negative thoughts and feelings.

Perception refers to how we interpret stimuli such as people, things, or events. Our perception is important to recognize because it is the driving force behind our reaction to things.