As Stephen delves into each of his auditors’ work to determine the sources of some errors that have come to his attention, he discovers that Juanita, one of the brightest young staff auditors, has made some mistakes in her audit working papers. He calls her into his office to confront her, hoping not only to ‘take her down a peg or two,” but to put her up as an object lesson for the other auditors, whom he thinks are getting too careless in their work.

As Stephen begins his talk with Juanita, he wastes no time in coming to the point. “I’ve been going over your work, and it looks like you’ve made some mistakes.” Juanita is taken aback, embarrassed, and incredulous, since she considers herself one of the best auditors in the department. Stephen then accuses her of taking shortcuts in her work and being generally irresponsible and careless.

As she protests, he confronts her with the audit test results reported in the papers and tells her, ‘SYou ought to know better than this! I won’t stand for work like this going out of here. You just see that it doesn’t happen again, you hear?” After Juanita apologizes begrudgingly, still not understanding how the mistakes could have happened, Stephen simply says, “Okay. Now get back to work. Remember our audit goals and the deadline on Thursday.”

Required:

Analyze this communication encounter in terms of the message characteristics outlined in the chapter. You should include an analysis of both Stephen’s and Juanita’s communication.