„‚ CONDITIONS THAT HINDER EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

form negative and adverse feelings about the speaker. The trainer with a transactional
view of communication would realize the importance of perception and disengage the
speaker from ownership of the views ex-pressed. The trainer could say, “When talking
about a controversial subject, you may argue for or against it. You do not have to
believe the position you are taking.”
Created Meaning
Acknowledgment that no two people interpret anything in the same way implies that the
same message has different meanings for different people (DeVito, 1994). The
transactional view not only recognizes that the same word has different meanings to
different people, it also recognizes a fourth component: meaning that is created
collaboratively between communicators (Stewart & Logan, 1993).
Whereas the action view is speaker-centered and the interactional view is messagecentered,
the transactional view recognizes the need for “a meaning-centered theory”
(Gronbeck et al., 1994, p. 502). An action or interactional view assumes that a message
has one meaning, held by the speaker, to be reproduced in the listener. The transactional
view, however, acknowledges a “productive rather than a reproductive approach to
understanding” (Broome, 1991, p. 240). The trainer and trainee are active participants in
the construction and negotiation of meanings. From a transactional perspective, the
meaning of the content is created in the interaction between people and the context
within which the communication occurs.
The following illustration comes from a training-in-residence event that involved
twenty trainees. A small space in a large room was marked off with tape. Two trainees
at a time were asked to enter the room, and each was asked to visualize his or her ideal
space within the marked-off area. The ideal spaces the trainees visualized were very
different from one another and usually were based on the individuals’ needs and desires.
Later, all the trainees were brought into the same marked-off area and were asked to
build a community out of the different spaces created in their imaginations. They soon
revealed that their projected desires and needs had different meanings and were in
conflict with one another. While one person had visualized a tent in the woods, another
had visualized an ocean, another a waterfall, and another an office in the city.
The next few days were spent working out these differences, processing the event,
and highlighting what could be learned from it. After the group finished this intense,
affective work, the room had taken on all kinds of affective meaning for the participants.
The trainers could not ignore this phenomenon and moved the remaining training events
to a different room.
This example demonstrates the importance of being aware of the created-meaning
component of the transactional model and also illustrates many of the other components
previously discussed, such as environment, interdependence, process, and perception.
An environment takes on different meanings to the trainees as they go through their
training, and this creation of meaning is ever changing. We cannot separate these
components from one another, because they are interrelated.
The Pfeiffer Library Volume 6, 2nd Edition. Copyright ©1998 Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer ❚❘ 149