MANAGEMENT CASE STUDY

Management Case Study

Management Case Study

Existing Processes of Communication

The existing communication process used in the given organization can be linked to Bakers' description of service organization. Managers have traditionally spent the majority of their time communicating in one form or another (meetings, face-to-face discussions, memos, letters, e-mails, reports, etc.). Today, however, more and more employees find that an important part of their work is communication, especially now that service workers outnumber production workers and research as well as production processes emphasize greater collaboration and teamwork among workers in different functional groups. Moreover, a sea-change in communication technologies has contributed to the transformation of both work and organizational structure. For these reasons, communication practices and technologies have become more important in all organizations, but they are perhaps most important in knowledge-intensive organizations and sectors and, as such, are of great significance to science organizations and to public science management. (Nash 1999 23-28)

The study of organizational communication is not new, but it has only recently achieved some degree of recognition as a field of academic study. It has largely grown in response to the needs and concerns of business. The first communication programs were typically located in speech departments, but most business schools now include organizational communication as a key element of study. The study of organizational communication recognizes that communication in organizations goes far beyond training managers to be effective speakers and to have good interpersonal communication skills. Moreover, it recognizes that all organizations, not just business organizations, have communication needs and challenges.

The field of organizational communication is highly diverse and fragmented, as evidenced by results of literature searches on the topic, textbooks in the area, and the Harvard Business Review's (1993) compilation of its communication articles, The Articulate Executive. It spans communication at the micro, meso, and macro levels; formal and informal communications; and internal organizational communication practices (newsletters, presentations, strategic communications, work direction, performance reviews, meetings) as well as externally directed communications (public, media, inter-organizational). Innovation, organizational learning, knowledge management, conflict management, diversity, and communication technologies are also addressed. As a new academic discipline, organizational communication is struggling to develop and convey some sense of coherency across these many areas. (McGrath 1996 215)

The technical view of communication is associated with information theory and usually traced back to Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver (1949). Shannon, an engineer at Bell Laboratories, portrayed communication as a mechanistic system, as shown in Figure 1. The important question in information theory is “how can an information source get a message to a destination with a minimum of distortions and errors?” In applying this mechanistic approach to interpersonal communication, the question is the same, although the mechanistic system is altered to some extent and the analysis is less technical and mathematical. The technical view of communication persists as a common basis for discussions about organizational communication.

The contextual approach to communication focuses not just on content (e.g. the accurate exchange of information or adequacy of conveying the intended meaning) but on the larger context of ...