Whole Foods Case Study

1.The interpersonal communication model that is illustrated by figure 8.1 consists of the key elements : the communicator, the receiver, the perpetual screens and the message. All of the elements can be applied to an online forum like the one John Mackey used, they just happen to be more impersonal than say a face to face communication. In the forum the communicator wold be John Mackey who used the user-name Rahodeb. The receiver was each person who read the posts by Rahodeb on the stock forums of Yahoo Finance. The perceptual screens illustrated in the figure would be the unique traits and characteristics of both the sender and receivers of the forum. These traits would include the ages, job positions, unique needs, beliefs, values,etc. of the forum participants. Lastly. The message would be the ideas and feelings that the sender wants to create in the person receiving the message. During this case John Mackey tried to his message that Wild Oats holds very little value in general and to Whole foods, as well as the fact that Whole Foods is a great company run by a very accomplished CEO. He wanted each receiver to feel the same way he did about the companies but each person who read it has a unique interpretation of what his motives were and how relevant his message was because of their own perceptual screens. Feedback was eventually given about the comments that he made in the forums when the Whole Foods board decided that he used a screen name other than is own name to “avoid having his comments associated with the company and to avoid others placing too much emphasis on his remarks.”

2.Defensive communication was very prominent in this case and seemed to be the main type of communication used by John Mackey. The text book describes defensive communication that is aggressive, attacking, and angry, or passive and withdrawing. The case states that in 2001 Mackey told CEO of Wild Oats Perry Odak “ I'm going to destroy you” which is clearly him being angry, aggressive, and attacking. He also made multiple forum posts being passive and attacking like