ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

The Communication Between Managers and Emploees and the Way They Communicate



The Communication Between Managers and Emploees and the Way They Communicate

Introduction

Employee Relations influences day-to-day relations between managers and non-managers in the workplace and labor relations, "the term denotes a range of employer initiatives to improve workplace communication, to attract employees, directly or indirectly in the decision making process and to ensure staff compliance with rules control through disciplinary measures.

Theorizing Communication in Organizations

As recently as the 1980s, we would have drawn a theory of organizational effectiveness such that communication was a mediating variable in our models. Now, we would place communication as a major causal variable determining many organizational outcomes influencing for example, strategy and an individual's organizational role (Rogers & Agarwala-Rogers, 1976).

A number of approaches exist in communication theory which parallel organizational theories. A 'mechanistic' perspective views communication as a transmission process by which a message physically travels across space through a channel, from one person to another, and assumes that the source governs what the receiver receives (Fisher, 1993). For example, Taylorism viewed communication as vertical (top-down), formal, and hierarchical, while Weberian 'bureaucracy' meant logic, order (command-and-control), and uniformity (Rogers & Agarwala-Rogers, 1976). Typically in the 'psychological' perspective, the receiver is the focus, with the assumption that individuals suffer information overload. From the 'interpretive-symbolic' perspective, behaviour creates and shapes the reality of the organization as well as its environment, the main emphasis being on shared meanings that form among people as they interact (Fisher, 1993). For instance, in the human relations school, information ascended from lower to upper levels of the organization, as well as flowing laterally. A 'systems' perspective focuses on people's external actions and sees communication as the whole being greater than the sum of parts (Rogers & Agarwala-Rogers, 1976). Correspondingly, integrated organizational perspectives such as the sociotechnical model, suggest that communication depends on the organization and its situation (Fisher, 1993). 'Contemporary' perspectives prompt questions about how the organisation defines itself: the most organic views being the 'brain' metaphor (Morgan, 1986) which implies that organizations can learn, and the 'culture' metaphor which examines how people use language to express and form meanings (Fisher, 1993).

Modelling 'Effective' Communication

Communication can be defined as the process by which an idea is transferred from a source to a receiver, the intention being to change receiver behaviour. The main components in the process typically include source, message, channel, receiver, effect, and feedback (Rogers & Agarwala-Rogers, 1976). King and Cushman (1994) suggested that high-speed management reflects an 'effective' communication system employed by well-managed companies, who rapidly reorient the organisation to a changing environment to retain competitive advantage. A theory of communication then, should reflect 'effective' communication which follows a strategy of co-alignment of diverse interests, concerns, and contributions through the use of an open flexible communication system allowing for the co-alignment of both similarities and differences in an innovative, flexible, and rapid response system (Conrad, 1994). Thus, communication systems and organizational and cultural values should be ...