Differences in communication skills between business, economics and management university students

Abstract

Several management professionals consider oral and written communication skills as essential tools for the success of any business manager. Although there are several efforts to improve these skills of students, the results are still unsatisfactory. This difficulty is noticeable in the classroom, when students must speak to explain their doubts, when they must do oral presentations of their research work carried out in the curricular units, and when they have answer written tests. The literature related to communication sciences argues that the difficulty felt in the apprehension of communication is the essential factor that makes the students ineffective at both oral and written skills. In this sense, higher education institutions need to improve their students' communication skills so that they can have greater success to enter the job market in the future. In this paper we explore the communication skills of students in the management area (n = 110) in order to understand how they are prepared. We applied the Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA), validated by McCroskey, Beatty, Kearney, & Plax (1985), to understand their communication skills. The results suggest that Business students reveal more communication skills than Economics and the latter than Management. We also found that female students show higher than male communication skills. The results of this research also suggest the increasing need for educational institutions to promote an ideal learning environment in which teachers can inspire their students to communicate orally. On the other hand, these results suggest the most important communication items to consider, the techniques and areas of intervention to improve communication process and provide clues to future research in this area of knowledge.