BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

Business communication

Business communication

Introduction

Members of organizations should understand that communication alone will not help in their being viewed as contributing and high-performing individuals. Through their communication, they need to secure the complete trust of their distributed members before they can be acknowledged as contributing and performing members of the organization. Further, an awareness of the mediating role of trust will hopefully prompt organization members to refrain from freeloading and other deceptive behaviors, thereby increasing the effectiveness/productivity of the entire organization. The study's results also highlight the importance of networks and network centrality within organizations. To be viewed as important contributors to the organization and as high performers, it is important that individuals occupy a strong central position within their communication and trust networks (Saonee, Manju, Suprateek & Kirkeby, 2011). By occupying central positions through high levels of communication and trust-inducing behaviors, an individual organization member is able to make him- or herself more visible to (and more relied upon by) the other distributed organization members. Such visibility also helps highlight the individual's contributions to the organization.

Discussion & Analyses

Owing to the geographical distribution and differences in context, the objective performance evaluations are likely to be more biased and potentially tainted. We believe that the study points to several avenues for future research. Here, we have used one specific measure of an individual organization member's structural position (i.e., the degree centrality) on his or her perceived performance, which was appropriate given that our objective was to test the three competing models. Apart from using degree centrality, structural roles (e.g., gatekeeper, liaison, bridge) of an individual within a organization could have implications for individual-level and organization-level outcomes (Berry, 2011). Thus, we invite future research that qualitatively or quantitatively examines the effect of individual's structural positions in their respective organizations on their performance. Another point worth mentioning is that we adopted a relational approach to measuring performance in this study, especially given that supervisory ratings have been criticized for being too political and supervisory ratings may not be appropriate in distributed organizations that are relatively flat, with emergent roles and responsibilities.

However, having said that, it must be acknowledged that some distributed organizations do have assigned project managers, with some of these managers participating in the daily activities of the organization, and with others serving in the role of external coordinators and evaluators. The evaluations by the project managers could be seen as more distant and objective (not relational), though not necessarily more accurate (Berry, 2011). Future research should thus investigate whether trust and communication centrality measures have a similar effect on individual performance when the performance ratings are assigned by the project managers rather than by peers in the organization who are intimately aware of the individual's communicative behaviors and quality of contributions to deliverables. In closing, we echo trust and communication being two fundamental concepts associated with globally distributed organizations undertaking knowledge work. Our hope is that this paper is able to provide clarification on how these two frequently used concepts come ...