Seite - 41 - in Coaching im digitalen Wandel

Digital coaching: A conceptually distinct form of coaching? 41 Media use in coaching What do we mean by »media«? The meaning of media has been conceptualised in different ways in communication literature. Shannon and Weaver (1963) and Clark (1983, 1985) understood media as the means of transmitting and receiv- ing communication messages like parcels (Reddy, 1979), whereby the nature of the media has no influence on the communication or learning process. Based on this view, the receiver passively consumes the message as it was transmit- ted, and regardless of whether the medium accommodates written, auditory or audio-visual cues. Another perspective would see the receiver play an active, constructive role in the communication process (Kozma, 1991, p. 179), acknowl- edging that the intended message being transmitted may differ from the inter- pretation of the message by the receiver, as for instance when the sender insin- uates something, or uses a metaphor, or is being ironic (Searle, 1975, p. 59). As implied in this view, communication may be explicit as well as implicit, and its effectiveness depends upon the congruence between these two aspects (Watz- lawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967). To understand not only the explicit messages but also the sender’s inten- tions and more implicit messages, it may make intuitive sense that media, which accommodate multiple sensory cues, are helpful. As Daft and Lengel (1986) proposed and empirically demonstrated (Daft, Lengel, & Trevino, 1987; Lengel & Daft, 1988), rich media, in other words media which allow multiple sensory cues and immediate feedback (e. g. face-to-face communication), are more suitable for resolving uncertainty and ambiguity than lean media (e. g. online text media); the latter being better suited for objective data transmis- sion. In a similar vein, the earlier theoretical model by Short, Williams and Christie (1976) proposed that media affect interpersonal communication based on their levels of social presence, »the degree of salience of the other person in the interaction« (op. cit., p. 65), which might be achieved through eye con- tact and physical proximity (face-to-face contact) and through both verbal and non-verbal communication messages. From this perspective, seen along a continuum, face-to-face contact allows a higher degree of social presence and offers a higher level of richness than video communication, followed by audio-based media and subsequently by online text-based communication, which may be considered impersonal and devoid of non-verbal cues ( Walther & Parks, 2002). Nevertheless, numerous empirical studies (a.o. Dennis & Kinney, 1998; Han- cock, Thom-Santelli, & Ritchie, 2004; Kinney & Watson, 1992) rejected that lean media are necessarily less appropriate for resolving complex situations than rich Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY-NC-ND 4.0