Social skill

A social skill is any skill facilitating interaction and communication with others. Social rules and relations are created, communicated, and changed in verbal and nonverbal ways. The process of learning these skills is called socialization. For socialization, Interpersonal skills are essential to relate one another. Interpersonal skills are the interpersonal acts a person uses to interact with others which are related to dominance vs. submission, love vs. hate, affiliation vs. aggression, control vs. autonomy categories (Leary, 1957). Positive interpersonal skills include persuasion, active listening, delegation, and stewardship among others. Social psychology is the academic discipline that does research related to social skills, the discipline studies how skills are learned by an individual through changes in attitude, thinking, and behavior.

Social skills are the tools that enable people to communicate, learn, ask for help, get their needs met in appropriate ways, get along with others, make friends and develop healthy relationships, protect themselves, and generally be able to interact with the society harmoniously. Social skill builds essential character traits like trustworthiness, respectfulness, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship. These traits help to build an internal moral compass, allowing individuals to make good choices in thinking and behavior, resulting in social competence.

The important social skills identified by the Employment and Training Administration are:

Social skills are goal oriented with both main- and sub-goals. For example, a workplace interaction initiated by a new employee with a senior employee at first will be with the main goal to gather information and the sub goal will be to establishing rapport in order to obtain the main goal.

Deficits in social skills where categorized by Gresham in 1998 as failure to recognize and reflect social skills, failure to model appropriate models, failure to perform acceptable behavior in particular situations in relation to developmental and transitional stages.

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