H
| Concept | Definition |
|---|---|
| Horizontal Communication | The flow of information between individuals, departments, or units at the same hierarchical level within an organization. |
| Haptics | The study of non-verbal communication through touch. |
| Harmonics | The art of creating a harmonious and consistent tone in written or spoken communication. |
| Human Resource Communication | Communication strategies and practices related to managing and engaging employees within an organization. |
| Hearing | The physiological ability to perceive sound, which is a crucial aspect of effective communication. |
| Horizontal Communication Network | The pattern of communication flow between individuals or departments at the same organizational level. |
| Hyperbole | Exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally, often used for emphasis or effect. |
| Headline | A brief, attention-grabbing phrase or sentence at the beginning of a document or section, often in larger font. |
| High-Context Culture | A culture in which a significant part of communication is implicit, relying on shared context, relationships, and non-verbal cues. |
| High-Performance Team | A group of individuals with complementary skills and mutual accountability, working collaboratively to achieve common goals. |
| Hierarchical Communication | The flow of information up and down the chain of command within an organization’s structure. |
| Halo Effect | The tendency to generalize positive perceptions of a person, brand, or product to other unrelated qualities. |
| Halo effect | The tendency for our overall impressions of others to affect objective evaluations of their specific traits. |
| Hawthorne effect | An increase in worker productivity observed at the Chicago Hawthorne plant of General Electric in the 1920s and 1930s attributed to improvements in worker-management communication and increased involvement of workers with each other. |
| Hermeneutics | The branch of philosophy that investigates the interpretation of texts; in one form popularized by Gadamer, hermeneutics emphasizes the historical and inherently linguistic nature of experience in denying a transmissional model of communication. |
| Hierarchy | A structuring of social statuses and roles within an organization or society ranked according to differentiations of power, authority, wealth, income, etc. Related terms are ranking or stratification. |
| High-context culture | Culture in which most of the information in a message is encoded in the physical context or the person’s mental catalogue of rules, roles and values. |
| Homeostasis | A characteristic of systems is that feedback seeks to maintain the system at its current level. |
| Horizontal chain of communication | Communication between organisation members on the same hierarchical level (between two managers or between two subordinates, for example). |
| Hot media | McLuhan’s term for relatively complete media that do not require significant human participation. |
| Human capital | The talents and capabilities that individuals contribute to the process of production. Companies, governments, and individuals can invest in this ‘capital’ just as they can invest in technology, buildings, or finances. |
| Humanism | Form of science that focuses on human choices, motives, and meanings and that assumes the reasons or causes of human behaviour lie within humans, not outside of them. |
| Hypodermic needle theory | The belief is that people receive information directly without any intervening variable, as in a vacuum. |