Development of a Training Program to Counter Manipulative Influences in Business Communications

Abstract Development of a training program to counter manipulative influences in business communications. Current work was performed to help employees of organizations who are victims of manipulation by their colleagues, which negatively affects both the personal effectiveness of employees and the effectiveness of the organization as a whole. The result of successful implementation of current work is a developed training to counter manipulative influences in business communications. In current work, the following tasks were set: • Analysis of psychological influence and manipulation phenomena; • Comparison manipulation to the context of business communications; • Formulation of effective ways to counter manipulative influences in business communications; • Development of a training program based on effective ways to counter manipulative influences in business communications. For research the phenomenon of manipulation were used the theory of influence of R. Cialdini, the theory of influence of E. Sidorenko and the theory of manipulation of E. Dotsenko. To determine the specifics of the business environment, we used descriptions of business communication by A. Panfilova and E. Sidorenko, as well as the culture of business communication by E. Smelkova. To formulate effective methods of countering were described the approaches and techniques of E. Dotsenko and E. Sidorenko, specified in the sphere of manipulations of the business environment. For the development of the training program used the structure proposed by Y. Zhukov. The key conclusions of this work are the concretization of the concept of manipulation in relation to other types of psychological influence, by highlighting a unique combination of criteria; the high prevalence of manipulation in the business environment; the lack of effectiveness of basic psychological mechanisms of protection against manipulation; the necessity for timely determination of manipulative influence for successful countering. The result of this work is a developed training program for countering manipulative influences in business communications for a group of participants of nine or twelve people who work in the same field and do not hold managerial positions. The recommendation for this work is to approbation the training program and adapt it to other sets of training participants.