Organizational communication

Organizational communication is a subfield of the larger discipline of communication studies. Organizational communication, as a field, is the consideration, analysis, and criticism of the role of communication in organizational contexts.

History of Organizational Communication

(This entire page contains gender bias language, i.e. "he, him, his," etc. Please edit)

The field traces its lineage through business information, business communication, and early mass communication studies published in the 1930s through the 1950s. Until then, organizational communication as a discipline consisted of a few professors within speech departments who had a particular interest in speaking and writing in business settings. The current field is well established with its own theories and empirical concerns distinct from other communication subfields and other approaches to organizations.

Several seminal publications stand out as works broadening the scope and recognizing the importance of communication in the organizing process, and in using the term "organizational communication". Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon wrote in 1947 about "organization communications systems", saying communication is "absolutely essential to organizations".

In the 1950s, organizational communication focused largely on the role of communication in improving organizational life and organizational output. In the 1980s, the field turned away from a business-oriented approach to communication and became concerned more with the constitutive role of communication in organizing. In the 1990s, critical theory influence on the field was felt as organizational communication scholars focused more on communication's possibilities to oppress and liberate organizational members.

Assumptions underlying early organizational communication

Some of the main assumptions underlying much of the early organizational communication research were:

• Humans act rationally. Sane people do not behave in rational ways, they generally have no access to all of the information needed to make rational decisions they could articulate, and therefore will make unrational decisions, unless there is some breakdown in the communication process-- which is common. Unrational people rationalize how they will rationalize their communication measures whether or not it is rational.

• Formal logic and empirically verifiable data ought to be the foundation upon which any theory should rest. All we really need to understand communication in organizations is (a) observable and replicable behaviors that can be transformed into variables by some form of measurement, and (b) formally replicable syllogisms that can extend theory from observed data to other groups and settings

• Communication is primarily a mechanical process, in which a message is constructed and encoded by a sender, transmitted through some channel, then received and decoded by a receiver. Distortion, represented as any differences between the original and the received messages, can and ought to be identified and reduced or eliminated.

• Organizations are mechanical things, in which the parts (including employees functioning in defined roles) are interchangeable. What works in one organization will work in another similar organization. Individual differences can be minimized or even eliminated with careful management techniques.

• Organizations function as a container within which communication takes place. Any differences in form or function of communication between that occurring in an organization and in another setting can be identified and studied as factors affecting the communicative activity.

Herbert Simon introduced the concept of bounded rationality which challenged assumptions about the perfect rationality of communication participants. He maintained that people making decisions in organizations seldom had complete information, and that even if more information was available, they tended to pick the first acceptable option, rather than exploring further to pick the optimal solution.

Through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s the field expanded greatly in parallel with several other academic disciplines, looking at communication as more than an intentional act designed to transfer an idea. Research expanded beyond the issue of "how to make people understand what I am saying" to tackle questions such as "how does the act of communicating change, or even define, who I am?", "why do organizations that seem to be saying similar things achieve very different results?" and "to what extent are my relationships with others affected by our various organizational contexts?"

In the early 1990s Peter Senge developed a new theories on Organizational Communication. These theories were learning organization and systems thinking. These have been well received and are now a mainstay in current beliefs toward organizational communications.

Communications networks

Networks are another aspect of direction and flow of communication. Bavelas has shown that communication patterns, or networks, influence groups in several important ways. Communication networks may affect the group's completion of the assigned task on time, the position of the de facto leader in the group, or they may affect the group members' satisfaction from occupying certain positions in the network. Although these findings are based on laboratory experiments, they have important implications for the dynamics of communication in formal organizations.

There are several patterns of communication:

• "Chain",
• "Wheel",
• "Star",
• "All-Channel" network,
• "Circle".

The Chain can readily be seen to represent the hierarchical pattern that characterizes strictly formal information flow, "from the top down," in military and some types of business organizations. The Wheel can be compared with a typical autocratic organization, meaning one-man rule and limited employee participation. The Star is similar to the basic formal structure of many organizations. The All-Channel network, which is an elaboration of Bavelas's Circle used by Guetzkow, is analogous to the free-flow of communication in a group that encourages all of its members to become involved in group decision processes. The All-Channel network may also be compared to some of the informal communication networks.

If it's assumed that messages may move in both directions between stations in the networks, it is easy to see that some individuals occupy key positions with regard to the number of messages they handle and the degree to which they exercise control over the flow of information. For example, the person represented by the central dot in the "Star" handles all messages in the group. In contrast, individuals who occupy stations at the edges of the pattern handle fewer messages and have little or no control over the flow of information.These "peripheral" individuals can communicate with only one or two other persons and must depend entirely on others to relay their messages if they wish to extend their range.

In reporting the results of experiments involving the Circle, Wheel, and Star configurations, Bavelas came to the following tentative conclusions. In patterns with positions located centrally, such as the Wheel and the Star, an organization quickly develops around the people occupying these central positions. In such patterns, the organization is more stable and errors in performance are lower than in patterns having a lower degree of centrality, such as the Circle. However, he also found that the morale of members in high centrality patterns is relatively low. Bavelas speculated that this lower morale could, in the long run, lower the accuracy and speed of such networks.

In problem solving requiring the pooling of data and judgments, or "insight," Bavelas suggested that the ability to evaluate partial results, to look at alternatives, and to restructure problems fell off rapidly when one person was able to assume a more central (that is, more controlling) position in the information flow. For example, insight into a problem requiring change would be less in the Wheel and the Star than in the Circle or the Chain because of the "bottlenecking" effect of data control by central members.

It may be concluded from these laboratory results that the structure of communications within an organization will have a significant influence on the accuracy of decisions, the speed with which they can be reached, and the satisfaction of the people involved. Consequently, in networks in which the responsibility for initiating and passing along messages is shared more evenly among the members, the better the group's morale in the long run.

Direction of communication

If it's considered formal communications as they occur in traditional military organizations, messages have a "one-way" directional characteristic. In the military organization, the formal communication proceeds from superior to subordinate, and its content is presumably clear because it originates at a higher level of expertise and experience. Military communications also carry the additional assumption that the superior is responsible for making his communication clear and understandable to his subordinates. This type of organization assumes that there is little need for two-way exchanges between organizational levels except as they are initiated by a higher level. Because messages from superiors are considered to be more important than those from subordinates, the implicit rule is that communication channels, except for prescribed information flows, should not be cluttered by messages from subordinates but should remain open and free for messages moving down the chain of command. "Juniors should be seen and not heard," is still an unwritten, if not explicit, law of military protocol.

Vestiges of one-way flows of communication still exist in many formal organizations outside the military, and for many of the same reasons as described above. Although management recognizes that prescribed information must flow both downward and upward, managers may not always be convinced that two-wayness should be encouraged. For example, to what extent is a subordinate free to communicate to his superior that he understands or does not understand a message? Is it possible for him to question the superior, ask for clarification, suggest modifications to instructions he has received, or transmit unsolicited messages to his superior, which are not prescribed by the rules? To what extent does the one-way rule of direction affect the efficiency of communication in the organization, in addition to the morale and motivation of subordinates?

These are not merely procedural matters but include questions about the organizational climate, pr psychological atmosphere in which communication takes place. Harold Leavitt has suggested a simple experiment that helps answer some of these questions. А group is assigned the task of re-creating on paper a set of rectangular figures, first as they are described by the leader under one-way conditions, and second as they are described by the leader under two-way conditions.(A different configuration of rectangles is used in the second trial.) In the one-way trial, the leader's back is turned to the group. He describes the rectangles as he sees them. No one in the group is allowed to ask questions and no one may indicate by any audible or visible sign his understanding or his frustration as he attempts to follow the leader's directions. In the two-way trial, the leader faces the group. In this case, the group may ask for clarifications on his description of the rectangles and he can not only see but also can feel and respond to the emotional reactions of group members as they try to re-create his instructions on paper.

On the basis of a number of experimental trials similar to the one described above, Leavitt formed these conclusions:

1. One-way communication is faster than two-way communication.
2. Two-way communication is more accurate than one-way communication.
3. Receivers are more sure of themselves and make more correct judgments of how right or wrong they are in the two-way system.
4. The sender feels psychologically under attack in the two-way system, because his receivers pick up his mistakes and oversights and point them out to him.
5. The two-way method is relatively noisier and looks more disorderly. The one-way method, on the other hand, appears neat and efficient to an outside observer.

Thus, if speed is necessary, if a businesslike appearance is important, if a manager does not want his mistakes recognized, and if he wants to protect his power, then one-way communication seems preferable. In contrast, if the manager wants to get his message across, or if he is concerned about his receivers' feeling that they are participating and are making a contribution, the two-way system is better.

Interpersonal communication

Training meeting about sustainable design. The photo shows a training meeting with factory workers in a stainless steel ecodesign company from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. An example of interpesonal communication

Main article: Interpersonal communication

Another facet of communication in the organization is the process of face-to-face, interpersonal communication, between individuals. Such communication may take several forms. Messages may be verbal (that is, expressed in words), or they may not involve words at all but consist of gestures, facial expressions, and certain postures ("body language"). Nonverbal messages may even stem from silence.

Managers do not need answers to operate a successful business; they need questions. Answers can come from anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world thanks to the benefits of all the electronic communication tools at our disposal. This has turned the real job of management into determining what it is the business needs to know, along with the who/what/where/when and how of learning it. To effectively solve problems, seize opportunities, and achieve objectives, questions need to be asked by managers—these are the people responsible for the operation of the enterprise as a whole.

Ideally, the meanings sent are the meanings received. This is most often the case when the messages concern something that can be verified objectively. For example, "This piece of pipe fits the threads on the coupling." In this case, the receiver of the message can check the sender's words by actual trial, if necessary. However, when the sender's words describe a feeling or an opinion about something that cannot be checked objectively, meanings can be very unclear. "This work is too hard" or "Watergate was politically justified" are examples of opinions or feelings that cannot be verified. Thus they are subject to interpretation and hence to distorted meanings. The receiver's background of experience and learning may differ enough from that of the sender to cause significantly different perceptions and evaluations of the topic under discussion. As we shall see later, such differences form a basic barrier to communication.

Nonverbal content always accompanies the verbal content of messages. This is reasonably clear in the case of face-to-face communication. As Virginia Satir has pointed out, people cannot help but communicate symbolically (for example, through their clothing or possessions) or through some form of body language. In messages that are conveyed by the telephone, a messenger, or a letter, the situation or context in which the message is sent becomes part of its non-verbal content. For example, if the company has been losing money, and in a letter to the production division, the front office orders a reorganization of the shipping and receiving departments, this could be construed to mean that some people were going to lose their jobs — unless it were made explicitly clear that this would not occur.

A number of variables influence the effectiveness of communication. Some are found in the environment in which communication takes place, some in the personalities of the sender and the receiver, and some in the relationship that exists between sender and receiver. These different variables suggest some of the difficulties of communicating with understanding between two people. The sender wants to formulate an idea and communicate it to the receiver. This desire to communicate may arise from his thoughts or feelings or it may have been triggered by something in the environment. The communication may also be influenced or distorted by the relationship between the sender and the receiver, such as status differences, a staff-line relationship, or a learner-teacher relationship.

Whatever its origin, information travels through a series of filters, both in the sender and in the receiver, before the idea can be transmitted and re-created in the receiver's mind. Physical capacities to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch vary between people, so that the image of reality may be distorted even before the mind goes to work. In addition to physical or sense filters, cognitive filters, or the way in which an individual's mind interprets the world around him, will influence his assumptions and feelings. These filters will determine what the sender of a message says, how he says it, and with what purpose. Filters are present also in the receiver, creating a double complexity that once led Robert Louis Stevenson to say that human communication is "doubly relative". It takes one person to say something and another to decide what he said.

Physical and cognitive, including semantic filters (which decide the meaning of words) combine to form a part of our memory system that helps us respond to reality. In this sense, March and Simon compare a person to a data processing system. Behavior results from an interaction between a person's internal state and environmental stimuli. What we have learned through past experience becomes an inventory, or data bank, consisting of values or goals, sets of expectations and preconceptions about the consequences of acting one way or another, and a variety of possible ways of responding to the situation. This memory system determines what things we will notice and respond to in the environment. At the same time, stimuli in the environment help to determine what parts of the memory system will be activated. Hence, the memory and the environment form an interactive system that causes our behavior. As this interactive system responds to new experiences, new learnings occur which feed back into memory and gradually change its content. This process is how people adapt to a changing world.

Communication Approaches in an Organization

Informal and Formal Communication are used in an organization.

Informal communication, generally associated with interpersonal, horizontal communication, was primarily seen as a potential hindrance to effective organizational performance. This is no longer the case. Informal communication has become more important to ensuring the effective conduct of work in modern organizations.

Top-down approach: This is also known as downward communication. This approach is used by the Top Level Management to communicate to the lower levels. This is used to implement policies, gudelines, etc. In this type of organizational communication, distortion of the actual information occurs. This could be made effective by feedbacks.

Research in organizational communication

Research methodologies

Historically, organizational communication was driven primarily by quantitative research methodologies. Included in functional organizational communication research are statistical analyses (such as surveys, text indexing, network mapping and behavior modeling). In the early 1980s, the interpretive revolution took place in organizational communication. In Putnam and Pacanowsky's 1983 text Communication and Organizations: An Interpretive Approach. they argued for opening up methodological space for qualitative approaches such as narrative analyses, participant-observation, interviewing, rhetoric and textual approaches readings) and philosophic inquiries.

During the 1980s and 1990s critical organizational scholarship began to gain prominence with a focus on issues of gender, race, class, and power/knowledge. In its current state, the study of organizational communication is open methodologically, with research from post-positive, interpretive, critical, postmodern, and discursive paradigms being published regularly.

Organizational communication scholarship appears in a number of communication journals including but not limited to Management Communication Quarterly, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Communication Monographs, Academy of Management Journal, Communication Studies, and Southern Communication Journal.

New ways for scholars to communicating within an organization by bring in a postcolonial perspective.

In recent years, Other voices are beginning to be recorded in organizational communication, especially in areas such as gender (e.g., see Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Mumby, 1993), race (e.g., see Ashcraft & Allen, 2003), and globalization (e.g., see Stohl, 2001). In fact, in a deeply reflexive article, “Thinking Differently About Organizational Communication,”George Cheney (2000) says that “taking difference seriously means not only allowing the Other to speak but also being open to the possibility that the Other’s perspective may come to influence or even supplant your own” (p. 140). Yet,despite such interventions, one key aspect in the dynamics of identity has not received much attention in organizational communication—postcolonial subjectivity and the mestiza consciousness born of being in the borderlands. Anzaldúa’s concept of mestiza consciousness transcends the nature of black-and-white theorizing and looks at issues of identity as multiple coexisting levels of subjectivities. The complex intersections between multiple subjectivities of issues of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and language remain underhighlighted in much of organizational communication scholarship and, yet, these are central to becoming sensitive to a postcolonial vision of our disciplinary future.

In terms of imagining a postcolonial rationality, Harvard-based, Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen draws on his multiple subjectivities to turn traditional utility theory economics on its head and argue instead for a more humane welfare economics—a body of scholarship that has grown from his own subjective experiences of famines caused by colonial policies in pre-independence India (Sen, 1981, 1987). For Sen (1992), it is not enough to talk about achieving equality in income distribution, for such a rhetoric of equality conceals the “substantive inequalities in, say, wellbeing and freedom arising out of such a distribution given the disparate personal and social circumstances of each individual” (p. 30).

At this point, it would be easy to think that concerns with postcolonial subjectivity, organizing, voice, and rationality rest fully within the empirical domain of our disciplinary partners of sociology, anthropology, literature,political science, economics, and history, to name a few. Banerjee and Linstead (2004), in fact, note that explicit political agendas, such as that of postcolonial thought, have never rested easily in organization studies. Few studies using a postcolonial frame exist and many are included in an edited volume by Anshuman Prasad (2003) entitled Postcolonial Theory and Organizational Analysis.

As Prasad (2003) makes clear, a postcolonial perspective can be productive in exposing neocolonial assumptions underlying management disciplines, describing neocolonialism as a continuationof Western colonialism through political, economic, and cultural control(Banerjee & Linstead, 2004).

When we as scholars unthinkingly adopt the discourse and knowledge of mainstream Euro-American organizational communication scholarship,we potentially absorb, without reflection, a particular way of understanding the world. In conclusion, what we are trying to imagine here and what can be seen in the exemplars above is a form of “writing back to the center,”where scholars from the disciplinary and epistemic margins of organizational communication write about their own cultured forms of organizing practices,using their experiences and ways of knowing to talk back to, reframe, contextualize,and perhaps even reinterpret commonly used theories and concepts within our field. For those scholars, living and working in Asia, Africa,South America, or the Asia-Pacific region, for example, this means learning from and supporting the multiple forms of cultural knowledge around organizing and communicating that are native to their region.

Disseminating work by native scholars of their contexts using native forms of knowing diversifies the field of organizational communication as well as the knowledge produced and consumed there, providing all members of our scholarly community with a richer array of concepts, methods, forms, and perspectives from which to understand our increasingly complex and globalized reality. In engaging in such an enterprise, we begin to reimagine the scholarly community of organizational communication as a transdisciplinary and transgeographical entity capable of disrupting contemporary hierarchies of knowledge and making sense of our flattening world. With this goal in mind, we request and look forward to lively conversations with scholars from within the traditionally defined discipline of organizational communication as well as those outside, as we work together to recognize, support, and engage diverse voices and contexts as well as multiple ways of organizing and communicating.

References: Ashcraft, K. (2006). Falling from a humble perch? Rereading organizational communication studies with an attitude of alliance. Management Communication Quarterly, 19(4), 645–652. Ashcraft, K., & Allen, B. (2003). Cheney, G. (2000). Thinking differently about organizational communication: Why, how, and where? Management Communication Quarterly, 14(1), 132–141. Sen, A. (1981). Poverty and famines: An essay on entitlement and deprivation. Oxford, UK: Clarendon. Sen, A. (1987). On ethics and economics. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Sen, A. (1992). Inequality re-examined. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Banerjee, S. B., & Linstead, S. (2004). Masking subversion: Neocolonial embeddedness in anthropological accounts of indigenous management. Human Relations, 57(2), 221–247.

Current Research Topics in Organizational Communication

The field of organizational communication has moved from acceptance of mechanistic models (e.g., information moving from a sender to a receiver) to a study of the persistent, hegemonic and taken-for-granted ways in which we not only use communication to accomplish certain tasks within organizational settings (e.g., public speaking) but also how the organizations in which we participate affect us.

These approaches include "postmodern", "critical", "participatory", "feminist", "power/political", "organic", etc. and adds to disciplines as wide-ranging as sociology, philosophy, theology, psychology, business, business administration, institutional management, medicine (health communication), neurology (neural nets), semiotics, anthropology, international relations, and music.

Currently, some topics of research and theory in the field are:

Constitution, e.g.,

• how communicative behaviors construct or modify organizing processes or products
• how the organizations within which we interact affect our communicative behaviors, and through these, our own identities
• structures other than organizations which might be constituted through our communicative activity (e.g., markets, cooperatives, tribes, political parties, social movements)
• when does something "become" an organization? When does an organization become (an)other thing(s)? Can one organization "house" another? Is the organization still a useful entity/thing/concept, or has the social/political environment changed so much that what we now call "organization" is so different from the organization of even a few decades ago that it cannot be usefully tagged with the same word – "organization"?

Narrative, e.g.,

• how do group members employ narrative to acculturate/initiate/indoctrinate new members?
• do organizational stories act on different levels? Are different narratives purposively invoked to achieve specific outcomes, or are there specific roles of "organizational storyteller"? If so, are stories told by the storyteller received differently than those told by others in the organization?
• in what ways does the organization attempt to influence storytelling about the organization? under what conditions does the organization appear to be more or less effective in obtaining a desired outcome?
• when these stories conflict with one another or with official rules/policies, how are the conflicts worked out? in situations in which alternative accounts are available, who or how or why are some accepted and others rejected?

Identity, e.g.,

• who do we see ourselves to be, in terms of our organizational affiliations?
• do communicative behaviors or occurrences in one or more of the organizations in which we participate effect changes in us? To what extent do we consist of the organizations to which we belong?
• is it possible for individuals to successfully resist organizational identity? what would that look like?
• do people who define themselves by their work-organizational membership communicate differently within the organizational setting than people who define themselves more by an avocational (non-vocational) set of relationships?
• for example, researchers have studied how human service workers and firefighters use humor at their jobs as a way to affirm their identity in the face of various challenges Tracy, S.J. (2006). "Cracking Jokes and Crafting Selves: Sensemaking and Identity Management Among Human Service Workers". Communication Monographs. 73: 283–308. doi:10.1080/03637750600889500. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help). Others have examined the identities of police organizations, prison guards, and professional women workers.

Interrelatedness of organizational experiences, e.g.,

• how do our communicative interactions in one organizational setting affect our communicative actions in other organizational settings?
• how do the phenomenological experiences of participants in a particular organizational setting effect changes in other areas of their lives?
• when the organizational status of a member is significantly changed (e.g., by promotion or expulsion) how are their other organizational memberships affected?
• what kind of future relationship between business and society does organizational communication seem to predict?

Power e.g.,

• how does the use of particular communicative practices within an organizational setting reinforce or alter the various interrelated power relationships within the setting? Are the potential responses of those within or around these organizational settings constrained by factors or processes either within or outside of the organization – (assuming there is an "outside"?
• do taken-for-granted organizational practices work to fortify the dominant hegemonic narrative? Do individuals resist/confront these practices, through what actions/agencies, and to what effects?
• do status changes in an organization (e.g., promotions, demotions, restructuring, financial/social strata changes) change communicative behavior? Are there criteria employed by organizational members to differentiate between "legitimate" (i.e., endorsed by the formal organizational structure) and "illegitimate" (i.e., opposed by or unknown to the formal power structure)? Are behaviors? When are they successful, and what do we even there "pretenders" or "usurpers" who employ these communicativemean by "successful?"

See also

• Communication studies
• International Communication Association
• National Communication Association
• Academy of Management
• Association for Business Communication
• Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators (UK)
• International Association of Business Communicators
• Anticipatory socialization

References

• Gergen, Kenneth and Tojo Joseph. 1996. "Psychological Science in a Postmodern Context." American Psychologist. October 2001. Vol. 56. Issue 10. p803-813

• Redding, W. Charles. 1985. "Stumbling Toward Identity: The Emergence of Organizational Communication as a Field of Study" in McPhee and Tompkins, Organizational Communication: Traditional Themes and New Directions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

• May, Steve and Mumby, Dennis K. 2005. "Engaging Organizational Communication Theory and Research." Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

• Cheney, G., Christensen, L.T., Zorn, T.E., and Ganesh, S. 2004. Organizational Communication in an Age of Globalization: Issues, Reflections, Practices." Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

• Terry, J. F. (2008). The Art of Asking: Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers. FT Press. PP. 2.

External links

• European Public Relations Education and Research Association
• International Communication Association
• National Communication Association
• Association for Business Communication
• International Association of Business Communicators
• Basics in Internal Organizational Communications by Carter McNamara
• Multi-Axial Modular Organizational Survey (open source)
• Association of Teachers of Technical Writing
• Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication
• IEEE Professional Communication Society
• Technical Communicators Association of New Zealand
• Tekom (pages available in English) Professional organization for technical communication, Germany
• Elephant (pages available in English) Professional organization for Technical Writers, Israel
• FTI (in Swedish) Professional organization for Technical Writers, Sweden