Bridging Positive Communication and Improvisation to Promote Positive Communication Skills Development

Abstract

This article looks at how I successfully redesigned a business communication course to support the development of students’ interpersonal and team communication as well as negotiation skills through a strong focus on positive communication and improvisation. The article demonstrates that building a course around Mirivel’s (2014) positive communication model and using improvisational techniques in learning activities can effectively support students’ business communication skills development. The article provides instructors with concrete course modules and activities that can be used in similar courses.

Introduction

Business, management, and professional communication courses for undergraduates aim to give students the basic communication skills they need to succeed in their careers (Moshiri & Cardon, 2014). Today, instructors face many pressures in planning their courses, including increasing group sizes (Bowse & Lawrence, 2017; Kryder, 2002) as well as the need to incorporate increasingly more topics such as team and interpersonal communication (Moshiri & Cardon, 2020) to meet employer requests for better interpersonal, listening, and teamwork skills (e.g., Cyphert et al., 2019; Schartel Dunn & Lane, 2019).

In this article, I argue that one effective way to enhance students’ interpersonal, listening, and teamwork skills in business communication courses is to focus on the different aspects of positive communication introduced by Mirivel (2014) in his practical model of positive communication (i.e., greeting, asking, complimenting, disclosing, encouraging, and listening to inspire and influence others). At the same time, focusing on these behaviors can develop students’ negotiation skills. I further argue that in helping students develop their positive communication skills, it can be valuable to use improvisational theater techniques because they have listening and other positive communication skills at their core (Gillian-Daniel et al., 2020).

The article is an action research study that looks at how I redesigned a 1st-year, mandatory communication skills course in Finland’s leading business school, Aalto University School of Business. The redesign centered around three issues: having positive communication as one of the central learning outcomes and as the core theme in the course modules, including key improvisation concepts in the core content, and using improvisation techniques in several learning activities. The outcome was a modular course structure similar to the one used by Tomlinson (2023) to make the approach easily adaptable to different course lengths and delivery modes.

Based on the study, the article has two main contributions. First, it examines how improvisational theater techniques can support positive communication skills development. And second, the article gives other business and professional communication practitioners one example of how to design an effective business communication course that focuses on the development of interpersonal and team communication as well as negotiation skills through a focus on positive communication and improvisation. I hope that this article can inspire other professionals to incorporate positive communication in the teaching and learning of communication skills in higher education.

Literature review

Positive Communication Scholarship

Following similar developments in psychology, organizational studies, and education, positive communication has in recent decades emerged as a distinctive area of study (see Socha & Beck, 2015). Positive communication encompasses “any verbal or nonverbal behaviors that function positively in the course of human interaction” (Mirivel, 2014, p. 7). As Mirivel and Fuller (2024, p. 747) elaborated, it “includes behaviors and speech acts that enrich human relationships, that are constructive, and which reflect from the individual a higher degree of confidence and excellence.”

The increasing interest in positive communication has given rise to Positive Communication Scholarship that has four central tenets (Mirivel & Fuller, 2024, pp. 747–748):

1. inquiring, through scientific approaches, into the nature of communication excellence such as what people do when they communicate at their best;

2. generating new knowledge by focusing on both the processes and outcomes of communication;

3. taking an affirmative stance and learning from the best practices of communication to create better social worlds; and

4. cultivating communication praxis to help both professionals and others communicate better.

Scholarship has shown that positive communication approaches can have significant benefits for different areas of life (see, e.g., The Routledge Handbook of Positive Communication edited by Muñiz-Veláques and Pulido, 2019). From the viewpoint of positive communication in organizations, Socha and Beck (2015) argued that positive message processes can support human needs satisfaction such as the need for esteem and belongingness and, by doing so, help individuals, groups, and organizations reach their full potential. Besides supporting overall needs satisfaction, positive communication practices can enhance collaboration (Mickel, 2024), employee well-being at work (Cardon & Wong, 2024), and employee retention (Williams et al., 2024) as well as support both relationship- and task-oriented leaders in their work (Biganeh & Young, 2025).

The ability to positively influence others is accessible to everyone as we can all make communicative choices that impact our own and others’ lives positively (Mirivel, 2019). Mirivel (2014) has introduced a practical positive communication model that comprises six concrete actions, each connected to a larger principle of communication: greeting to create human contact; asking to discover the unknown; complimenting to affect people’s sense of self; disclosing to deepen relationships; encouraging to give support; and listening to transcend differences. The basic idea behind this framework is that improving your communication leads to better interpersonal relationships (Mirivel, 2014).

Because of the central role of Mirivel’s model in the field of positive communication, it was one of the key influences in redesigning the course that is described in this article. In addition to positive communication, the course builds on key concepts from improvisation and improvisation theater. These are reviewed next.

Improvisation and Improvisation Theater

Improvisation as a general concept is used by everyone every day, as it is a “fundamental aspect of life” (Macdonald & Wilson, 2020, p. 1): when something unexpected happens, we need to react to it somehow, in a way we have not been able to plan. Several scholars have defined improvisation (see e.g., Frost & Yarrow, 1990; Mannucci et al., 2021). Common to these definitions is that in improvisation, planning and execution converge (Vera & Crossan, 2023) so that the improviser quickly adapts to the situation (Kulhan, 2017).

Improvisation has traditionally been connected with performing arts. Several studies have examined the role of improvisation in, for example, musical performance (Biasutti & Frezza, 2009; Dolan et al., 2013; Gould & Keaton, 2000), dance (Carter, 2000), or creativity (Schwenke et al., 2020). In the field of theater, improvisation started taking root in the 1960s and 1970s, inspired especially by the work of Viola Spolin (1963) in the United States and Keith Johnstone (1979) in the United Kingdom. Contrary to traditional theater, improvisational theater is a method in which performers choose to not plan any aspects of their performance (Zaunbrecher, 2011).

Different aspects that enable successful theater improvisation include, for example, trust, listening and awareness, having a “yes, and” attitude, and accepting others’ offers (Koppett, 2001)—all techniques that also promote positive communication. Another central concept in improvisational theater is status (Koppett, 2001). Status, negotiated between individuals in any social interaction (Mason et al., 2014), refers to a combination of verbal and nonverbal behaviors that indicate a person’s social position in a group (Johnstone, 1979). High-status behaviors include occupying more space with, for example, a loud voice, large gestures, and direct eye contact, whereas low-status behaviors include the opposite, occupying as little space as possible with a quiet voice; small, quick gestures; and indirect eye contact (Coppens, 2002).

In promoting positive communication, understanding the role that status behavior plays in any interaction is very helpful because both high- and low-status behaviors have the potential to impact communicative situations positively or negatively. When used constructively, they exemplify the kinds of verbal and nonverbal behaviors and speech acts that “function positively in the course of human interaction” (Mirivel, 2014, p. 7). Linking this to Socha and Beck’s (2015) discussion of the relationship between positive communication and human needs, constructive status behavior choices could facilitate needs satisfaction, especially the need for esteem originally identified by Abraham Maslow (1943). At the same time, when not used well, they can also inhibit needs satisfaction, as discussed next.

For example, depending on the nuances of their behavior, people expressing high-status behaviors might be seen positively as strong, confident, and competent but also negatively as bossy, arrogant, or threatening (Routarinne, 2008). From the viewpoint of human needs satisfaction, they might be using facilitative processes such as celebratory support, compliments, politeness, and praising that support the need for esteem or inhibitive communication processes such as condemning, impoliteness, insulting, mocking, and put-downs that negatively affect the need for esteem (Socha & Beck, 2015). A similar dynamic can be found with low-status behaviors. People expressing such behaviors are often seen as good, empathetic listeners but might also be interpreted as nervous and submissive (Routarinne, 2008). While empathetic listening is a facilitative communication process, submissive, withdrawing behavior can potentially lead to inhibiting communicative processes such as ignoring (Socha & Beck, 2015). As a conclusion, by understanding status behavior and its constant impact on interactive situations, we can learn to influence each interaction in a way that supports positive communication.

Improvisation Theater Methods in Communication Skills Education

Outside performing arts, improvisation is increasingly seen as a key capability for today’s organizations, as established procedures and strategic plans are not enough to successfully navigate quickly changing environments; it is also necessary to be able to act spontaneously in unexpected situations (Mannucci et al., 2021; Vera & Crossan, 2004). There is increasing evidence that using improvisation exercises can help people develop the kind of leadership skills, including listening, communication, and collaboration skills, that are necessary in an uncertain and ambiguous world (Dufresne, 2020). For example, studies have found that improvisation can increase people’s self-confidence (Benjamin & Kline, 2019; Irizarry-Quintero & Meléndez-Ramos, 2025), social interaction capabilities (Seppänen et al., 2019), as well as understanding of cultural differences (Whalen et al., 2024a) and different audience needs (Whalen et al., 2024b) to make them better communicators. Improvisation can also support the development of future leaders’ emotional intelligence (Shivarajan & Andrews, 2021).

These and other recent studies suggest that improvisation can indeed effectively support the development of students’ communication skills in different ways. Next, the article turns to look at how the target course was redesigned to combine the best of positive communication and improvisation to support student learning.

Methodology

This section describes how I redesigned, using an action-research approach, a mandatory 1st-year communication course to integrate central concepts from positive communication and improvisation theater to support students’ communication skills development and meet employer requests for better interpersonal, listening, and teamwork skills (see, e.g., Cyphert et al., 2019; Schartel Dunn & Lane, 2019).

Background Information

Before 2015, the Aalto University School of Business had two mandatory communication courses for decades, one in Finnish and the other in English. The courses had a lot of overlapping content on writing and presentations, typical focus areas in business communication courses (Moshiri & Cardon, 2014, 2020).

To avoid overlapping content, the Finnish course was changed to Corporate Communication in 2015. Receiving rather poor student feedback, the course was only run for 2 years. A new responsible teacher took over in 2017 and changed the course to Communication and Project Management. Unfortunately, the revised focus did not function much better.

In 2019, it was decided that a new approach was needed. I was appointed as the new responsible teacher, tasked with rethinking the course entirely to fix the two key problem areas: the overall course focus and the course themes that students felt irrelevant. The course also needed to consider our increasing student numbers and a simultaneous decrease in the number of faculty available to teach the course.

In the redesign process, it was important to build a course that would meaningfully complement the 2nd-year business communication skills course that was continuing to run successfully. Compared to other business communication courses (Moshiri & Cardon, 2014, 2020), it seemed that our course was missing a coverage of interpersonal and team communication themes. Focusing on these was also critical from a program perspective, as these skills are one of the overall learning outcomes of our undergraduate program. Another program-level decision was to include negotiation skills as part of the core content, as graduate surveys had highlighted a need to teach these in the program.

Being given relative autonomy with the course gave me an opportunity to design a course reflecting my own values and benefiting students in the best possible way. In line with other positive communication scholars, I believe that positive communication can truly be an “inspirational force for people and organizations” (Mirivel & Fuller, 2024, p. 743), making it important to teach positive communication skills to future business leaders. This belief has been strengthened by over 15 years of experience from improvisation theater, where the positive, accepting atmosphere promotes belongingness, creativity, and well-being, among other things. I therefore felt that this was a great chance to build the course around positive interpersonal and team communication skills, supporting the development of such skills with the best of improv.

Approach: Action Research

Intent on developing a well-functioning course and then disseminating information to others, I decided to take an action research approach, initiated originally by Kurt Lewin in 1946 (Cohen et al., 2007). Action research is a broad research approach that aims to achieve change at the level of individuals, groups, or organizations (Dickens & Watkins, 1999). Because of its practical goal of bringing about change, it is a common approach to practitioner research in the field of education (Taber, 2007). Unlike in traditional research, action research often uses “I” as the author of the report, a practice that I have followed in this article.

Action research has many definitions, and the action research process has been represented in different ways (for a review, see Cohen et al., 2007). This study adopted the definition of Ebbutt (1985, p. 156, cited in Cohen et al., 2007, p. 297) who defined it as “a systematic study that combines action and reflection with the intention of improving practice” and the eight-step approach suggested by McNiff (2002, p. 71):

1. Review your current practice

2. Identify an area you wish to improve

3. Ask focused questions about how you can improve it

4. Imagine a way forward

5. Try it out, and take stock of what happens

6. Modify your plans in light of what you have found, and continue with the action

7. Evaluate the modified action

8. Reconsider the position in light of the evaluation

Steps 1 and 2 have already been discussed above. The following section first briefly discusses Steps 3–8 before the article moves to a discussion of the key modules and activities of the course to give an example of how positive communication and improvisation can be brought together to support students’ development of positive communication skills.

Step 3: Questions about how you can improve the current practice

Action research is insider research, and the researcher and their values greatly influence what happens as well as the choice of conceptual frameworks for the research (McNiff, 2002). To ensure the course would be based on relevant research and not just my own experiences, I focused on business communication, positive communication, and improvisation literature, as discussed in the literature review.

Based on the literature review and an analysis of the challenges in our earlier courses, I asked myself:

• How can I redesign the course so that it focuses on key interpersonal and communication skills necessary in working life and contributes to a better future society for everyone by centering around positive communication?

• How can I successfully integrate what I consider to be the best of improv to this business school course?

Step 4: Way forward with a course focused on positive communication and improvisation

In designing the course, I used Mirivel’s (2014) model of positive communication, complementing it with two of the key ideas from improv, “yes, and” and status behavior, and the need to include negotiation skills in the course. Based on these, I designed seven course modules that are discussed below in the “Course Modules and Key Activities” section, after a brief description of Steps 5–8 in the research process.

Steps 5–8: Iterative process of trying out, evaluating, modifying, and reconsidering

The course was initially piloted in Spring 2020 to 11 students from across Aalto University to gather and interpret data. The pilot assessed whether the choices and values that informed the design of the course were justified and the goal of the course reached, an important step in action research (McNiff, 2002).

To evaluate the success of the pilot, I used five data sources, and similar sources have been used every year since in each iterative round. As a quantitative and main measure of success, I looked at average end-of-course feedback, establishing a target of minimum 4/5 for the category “overall course assessment.” To give me further information about how to develop the course further, I analyzed students’ informal comments in midterm feedback, reflection papers submitted at the end of the course, and open comments in the end-of-course feedback. In addition, I made careful notes after each session of what worked and what did not, deciding what to keep and what to change before the next course.

Students’ numerical feedback from the pilot was positive (4.82/5) and above the established target. This was supported by my other observations that suggested that the students believed the content was valuable and course implementation was good. This gave a solid basis for rolling out the course at the School of Business for all 1st-year students in fall 2020.

Since the pilot, we have taught the course under the name “Communication and Interaction Skills in Business” to 6–10 groups of 40 (2020–2022) or 70 students (2023 onwards) yearly, totaling over 30 groups and 1,600 students. Out of these groups, 11 have been taught by me and have been a part of this study. After all these rounds of iteration, the course has the same structure. The course uses the flipped-classroom approach so that students study theory-based videos and readings before each class, and we spend all face-to-face time on practical activities.

Course Modules and Key Activities

Similarly to Tomlinson (2023), the course has been designed modularly, which makes the content adaptable to different course lengths and delivery modes. We teach the course with nine in-class sessions over 6 weeks, using two sessions for both negotiation simulations and team project presentations, and one session for all other modules. For courses running over different lengths, these seven modules can easily be complemented with modules on writing and presentations that we cover in our 2nd-year business communication course as well as other relevant business communication content such as critical thinking or social media and technology (Moshiri & Cardon, 2020).

Upon completion of the course, the student will be able to

• understand the role and importance of communication and interaction in working life,

• act in a way that consciously promotes positive interaction,

• use different tools that support creativity and collaboration in team projects,

• give impactful presentations, and

• act constructively in negotiations.

The section below introduces the seven course modules as well as key activities we use in each. The activities that are described support the course’s overall learning goals by

1. giving the students an opportunity to practice the different aspects of the positive communication model (Mirivel, 2014) to help them understand how they can consciously promote positive interaction in different situations;

2. helping the students understand the difference that a “yes, and” approach makes for promoting a positive, collaborative atmosphere; and

3. demonstrating the impact that status behavior can have on facilitating or inhibiting positive interaction and human needs satisfaction.

Detailed instructions for these key activities, including debriefing questions, are available in Appendix 1. In most sessions, we also use several other exercises to support student learning.

Note that Activities 3 and 5 discussed below start from a negative behavior. This approach works very well with my teaching style and the students have a lot of fun with these activities. This approach, however, requires a strong trust relationship with the students, and there is a risk that the negative-to-positive approach can make the learning goals for the activities unclear or shut students down from participating. It is therefore good to evaluate the fit of this approach with your own teaching style. It is equally possible to focus solely on the positive activities.

Module 1: Greet to Create Human Contact

As Mirivel (2021) stated, greeting is often the starting point of all communication that builds the foundation for relationships with others. Our first module helps the students start their relationship and trust building with each other. We do this with two key activities outlined next.

Activity 1: Speed dating (group size 10–40; 20 min)

This icebreaker exercise focuses on helping the students meet and greet several others in the group. Students pair up and form an inner and outer circle so that each pair faces each other. They are then given 45 s to greet the person in front of them, exchange names, and then use the rest of the time to talk about anything they want. Following instructions from the facilitator, people in the outer circle stay while everyone in the inner circle moves one step to the right so that they face a new person. The process is repeated until the students meet their original pair again.

Activity 2: Sharing your life story (student pairs; 15 min)

The second icebreaker exercise gives students an opportunity to get to know one person in more depth. At the same time, this is the first active listening exercise. Working in pairs, students have 3+3 min time to share their life stories with each other so that while one person tells their story, the other simply listens. Afterward, the students share the three most important things they learned about their pair to others in a concise manner (using max. 30 s). In larger groups, this last phase can be done in groups of five pairs.

Desired learning outcomes

These two exercises help the students understand how greeting others and active listening can support relationship building and create a strong platform for effective future collaboration. This will help them to understand that greeting, and getting to know others plays an important role in business settings.

Module 2: Listen to transcend differences

Our second module focuses on developing students’ listening skills through two key activities.

Activity 3: Identifying bad listener stereotypes (student pairs; 15-20 min)

The students work in pairs. We first go through three short 1–2-min conversations where one of the pair members has a bad listener role, and the other one tries to have a normal conversation. After the 3 examples, the student pairs list as many other bad listener stereotypes as possible based on their own experiences. The students are very good at this, with some groups identifying up to even 30 recognizable stereotypes. We wrap up by reflecting on which stereotypes we can recognize in ourselves. This helps each student identify personal listening behaviors that they could enhance.

Activity 4: Listening to understand (student pairs; 10 min)

This activity helps the students enhance their listening practices, especially listening to understand, not to reply. We first briefly review the idea of paraphrasing or mirroring something important from what the other person said, for example, the main idea or some key words, before adding your own contribution to the conversation. We then give the students 4 min of uninterrupted conversation time where they practice this. We debrief by discussing how that felt. The students report that they were listened to, and that the conversation processed very smoothly and involved both parties equally.

Desired learning outcomes

These two activities help the students reflect on their own listening behaviors and identify ways to become better listeners. As a key learning outcome, the students learn the importance of listening to understand, not to respond.

Module 3: Encourage to Give Support

In this module, we center on the technique that makes successful improvisation possible, that is, “yes, and.” Adopting the “yes, and” attitude is an excellent way to encourage others and to promote positive interaction in teamwork situations. It also helps to build people’s confidence when their ideas are listened to, accepted, and built on. This is a good example of the kind of encouragement and social support that Mirivel (2021) suggested can help people to become better versions of themselves.

We first practice the “yes, and” technique and then go on to demonstrate its positive impact in a group ideation exercise.

Activity 5: Using “yes, and” (student pairs; 7 min)

This activity demonstrates the benefits of adopting a “yes, and” approach when trying to collaborate. Similar to Dufresne (2020) and Shivarajan and Andrews (2021), we first look at what happens when we have a less-collaborative approach, and the students simply reply “no” to everything the other party suggests. They very quickly notice that this exhausts the willingness to work together. This is followed by the students replying “yes, and” to every suggestion instead. In the debrief, students can easily see the benefit and difference that a positive, encouraging approach has for collaboration.

Activity 6: Inventing three new products (groups of four or five; 12+20 min)

This activity builds on the previous one and works to further demonstrate the power of “yes, and.” Working in groups of four or five, the students are asked to invent three new products and a marketing strategy for each in just 9 min using the “yes, and” approach. After this, they are given 3 min to plan how to pitch one of the products to the whole group, and then 1 min for the actual pitch. In the debrief, the students are often amazed at their own creativity and that they were able to complete the task in such a short time.

Desired learning outcomes

These 2 activities help the students realize the extremely positive impact that “yes, and” can have for effective collaboration. They also underline how this approach contributes to a positive atmosphere that further supports teamwork and creativity.

Module 4: Ask to discover the unknown and disclose to deepen relationships

In Module 4, students have an opportunity to discover how asking and disclosing can help us deepen our relationships (Mirivel, 2014), and how this can effectively support successful teamwork. Following the model provided by Toegel and Barsoux (2016) in their article “How to Preempt Team Conflict,” the student teams go through 5 sets of discussion questions that help them to discover how others think. This sharing of personal views helps them to deepen their team relationship, and these conversations are one of the main reasons that students often feel that their team has worked well in the course.

Activity 7: Having team discussions (groups of four or five; 90 min)

Working with their project teams (four or five students), the students are guided through the five sets of discussion questions proposed by Toegel and Barsoux (2016). We give them 12 min for each question set and ask each one of the students to facilitate one set. In the debrief, the students comment on how the discussions helped them to become much closer as a team. Based on our very positive experiences, the discussions are well worth the time that we spend on them.

Desired learning outcomes

During the course, the students complete two separate team projects that require a lot of creativity and collaboration. This team discussion activity early on in the course helps the students build a deeper relationship with and a better understanding of their team members to support collaboration and creativity as well as prevent team conflict. According to student experiences—most students love working with their teams—and their amazing project outcomes, these discussions are valuable and effective.

Module 5: Understand Status Behavior to Support Positive Communication

As discussed in the literature review, another central concept in improv theater is status behavior. Understanding how status behavior impacts interactive situations can help us adopt behaviors that support positive communication patterns. In this module, we go through a series of exercises where students vary their status behavior and observe how this impacts communication situations. We then end the session with the pair activity outlined next.

Activity 8: Having manager-employee discussions (student pairs; 15 min)

Student pairs have 3-min manager-employee discussions in which the employee presents an idea they have for improving the company’s operations. They vary their status behaviors as follows: 1st min: manager adopts high-status behaviors, employee low; 2nd min: manager adopts low-status behaviors, employee high; 3rd min: employee adopts very high- or very low-status behaviors and can change these at any point, the manager tries to mirror behaviors throughout. The debrief focuses on the impact that different status behaviors had on the conversation.

Desired learning outcomes

The exercise helps the students understand two important issues about status behaviors: first, how mirroring the other party’s status behavior tends to work best in promoting successful interaction, and second, how easily high-status behaviors turn negative and start leading to inhibitive communication practices, identified by Socha and Beck (2015) as insulting, put-downs, and impoliteness.

Module 6: Bring It All Together in Negotiations

Activity 9: Practicing negotiations (student pairs; 2–3 hr)

In this module, we have two negotiation simulations (in two separate sessions) based on written negotiation cases. Before the first simulation, we stress that negotiations are a process that include several steps where positive communication skills are critical, for example:

• getting to know the other party at the start of the negotiation to build trust (greeting, listening, asking, and disclosing in the form of small talk);

• exchanging information about technical details, needs, interests, and fears (asking and disclosing, listening); and

• inventing options together to enlarge the negotiation pie (encouraging with the “yes, and” approach, asking and disclosing, listening).

We repeatedly stress that listening is one of the essential negotiation skills and encourage the students to ask a lot of questions to find out about the other party’s situation and their true interests. We also remind them of the importance of being aware of their status behaviors during the negotiations.

As part of the debrief, the students give feedback to their negotiation partner. They often mention how they could have asked significantly more questions and listened to the other party a lot more to reach better outcomes.

Desired learning outcomes

The negotiation simulations give the students the opportunity to apply all the positive communication skills that they have practiced in a “real” business situation. As such, the simulations in a way give meaning to all the smaller activities we have had in the course. Based on our experiences, they work very nicely as a culmination activity because they effectively bring all the positive communication themes together.

Module 7: Compliment to Affect People’s Sense of Self

In his positive communication model, Mirivel (2014) suggested that we should compliment others to affect them positively. In our course, we cover this issue from the viewpoint of giving meaningful positive and constructive feedback. During the course, students study materials related to meaningful feedback and practice giving feedback several times before Module 7 that wraps up the course.

Activity 10: Giving feedback to team members (groups of four or five, 20 min)

In this last session, after their last team project presentations, each student gets 3 min of focused feedback from their team members relating to how they worked within the team. The feedback must include both the student’s strengths and things that they could do even better in the future. We instruct that all the feedback must be phrased positively to ensure it has a positive effect on the recipient’s sense of self, for example, “You have a lot of great ideas. In the future, you can voice them even more because they add a lot of value to the team.”

Desired learning outcomes

All the feedback activities during the course aim to enhance the students’ ability to give genuine and meaningful feedback to others to affect them positively, even when the feedback is directed to change a behavior. During the activities, we highlight the importance of remembering to also give positive feedback that highlights what the person is already doing well, not just feedback on what they could do better. While this might sound evident, giving positive feedback to others has not been a natural part of the Finnish culture in the past, and it might first feel difficult for the students to give (and receive) it.

Findings

Positive feedback

Since 2020, I have reviewed a total of 470 numerical end-of-course assessments (response rates >90%) and over 500 open comments relating to what was good in the course and what to develop, and equally many midterm feedback comments. In addition to these main data, I have talked with students in every class to ask for their thoughts and make notes to record what works and what needs to be changed.

Based on students’ formal and informal feedback as well as my own subjective assessment, the course has been very successful.

Quantitatively, the average numerical course assessment (for the category “course overall assessment”) has been on average 4.24/5 in the 11 groups that I have taught. This has exceeded my minimum criteria of 4/5 and indicates that the course is working well. This is especially positive considering the large group size (70) that we now have. Ideally, I believe the course would be taught to much smaller groups because of its very interactive nature. At the same time, it has been great to notice that it is also possible to teach these skills to large groups effectively.

Based on my other observations and listening to the students throughout the years, there are a few important contributors to the success of the course. First, many of the exercises, especially the improv ones, push the students out of their comfort zones to some extent but, at the same time, offer fun, low-threshold opportunities to practice positive communication skills. They help to create a practical, active, positive, and enthusiastic atmosphere that supports learning and makes it easy to participate. Second, the team discussions in Module 4 and the two bigger team projects have created a well-functioning combination that motivates the students to collaborate meaningfully rather than simply splitting the work between themselves. At the end of the course, they can be proud of the creative projects that they have developed, which helps them realize how valuable successful teamwork can be.

Things to Consider

As discussed, we use the flipped-classroom approach to enable us to focus on practical activities in class. To some extent, we have struggled with how to motivate the students to study the relevant course materials before each session and have decided to use quizzes in our digital learning platform. However, even though the quizzes have worked rather well, they are a somewhat poor fit with the otherwise very practical learning experience. It has also become too easy for the students to use AI to complete the quizzes. This is therefore an issue that we might need to rethink in the future.

Another issue that we keep weighing is whether to have the same team for both team projects. So far, we have decided to keep the students in the same teams as having just one team to work with intensively enables the students to deepen their relationship with one group of people. This also helps to highlight the different teamwork phases better and enables the students to observe team dynamics and positive interaction patterns in even more depth. This has been a good solution for us because almost all teams have worked well together in the past. It could be interesting, however, to also try having them work in two different teams to see how that might affect the overall course dynamic and the team project outcomes.

Discussion and Conclusion

This article has outlined one example of how positive communication themes can be successfully integrated into a business communication course, and how these themes can be supported by key concepts, most importantly the “yes, and” idea and status behavior, from improvisation theater. To help practitioners planning and teaching similar courses, the article has included a description of the key modules and activities of the course. By doing the above, the article hopes to inspire other practitioners and answer Mirivel and Fuller’s (2024) call for research articles that provide tangible recommendations for how to explicitly cultivate communication praxis and help people improve the way they communicate.

Practical implications

Based on the study and a long experience from teaching other communication skills courses using improvisational methods, I would like to make three observations.

First, Mirivel’s (2014) model of positive communication can provide a well-functioning framework for business communication courses aiming to develop students’ interpersonal and team communication skills. In our case, using the six different aspects of the model to design a modular course structure has helped us to create a clearly progressing course that supports students’ learning. These positive communication modules are also easy to combine with modules on, for example, negotiation (like we have done), writing, or presentation skills to design courses that last longer.

Second, including two important elements of improvisation theater, “yes, and” and status behavior, in a course aiming to support the development of students’ interpersonal and team communication skills can be very useful. “Yes, and” can be a very effective way to support students’ collaboration skills and learning to use this accepting approach can have long-lasting positive consequences on their ability to work with others. Status behavior, on the other hand, is present in all communication, either consciously or subconsciously. Consequently, a deep understanding of how status behavior influences interaction and how to modify one’s own behavior consciously gives a practical tool for promoting positive communication in any interactive situation.

Finally, it is encouraged that anyone teaching positive communication skills or aiming or enhance their own skills would get acquainted with different improvisation theater methods and exercises, some of which were outlined in this article. Because positive communication and improvisation theater share many common features, not least the importance of listening to others and building trust, using methods from the latter can make teaching and learning positive communication easy, fun, interactive, and engaging. They also work extremely well as ice breakers and team-building methods that help to get a group of people ready to learn together very quickly.

Limitations

The main limitations of this article are twofold. First, like all action research, it is very much subjective insider research. Both the study and the course that it focuses on are strongly influenced by my own values, presence, and teaching style (McNiff, 2002). This subjectivity should be kept in mind when reading the article.

Second, the study focuses on a single course, in one business school. Even though the course has now been successfully taught over 30 times to approximately 1,600 students by nine different teachers, it still represents just one possible way to integrate positive communication and improvisational methods to a communication course. It has worked very well in the Finnish context, but it is possible that other contexts would require a different approach. Further, as educators, we all have our own ways of being that naturally impact how we teach and support students, and we need to find the right ways for us. At the same time, I sincerely hope that this article can inspire the readers to further positive communication education in their own work whenever and wherever possible.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-bcq-10.1177_23294906251406937 – Supplemental material for Bridging Positive Communication and Improvisation to Promote Positive Communication Skills Development

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-bcq-10.1177_23294906251406937 for Bridging Positive Communication and Improvisation to Promote Positive Communication Skills Development by Christa Tammenluoto in Business and Professional Communication Quarterly