Workplace Communication

Leena Mikkola, Maarit Valo, Leena Mikkola, Maarit Valo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429589478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Comportamiento organizacional

This book provides insights into communication practices that enable efficient work, successful collaboration, and a functional work environment. Maintaining a productive and healthy workplace is predicated on interpersonal communication between people. In organizations, efficient communication is the foundation of all actions. Contributors to this book cover communication issues in relationships, teams, meetings, leadership, competence, diversity, organizational entry, social support, and digital environments in the workplace. The book illustrates all these issues in detail by presenting both relevant research findings and their practical implications in working life.

Workplace Communication is ideal for current and future employees, directors, supervisors and managers, instructors, and consultants in knowledge-based expertise work. The book is appropriate for courses in organizational and leadership communication or interpersonal communication in a workplace setting.

PART I

Foundations of Workplace Communication

1

FOCUSING ON WORKPLACE COMMUNICATION

Maarit Valo and Leena Mikkola

Introduction

Human communication has a constitutive role in the workplace: It is in workplace communication that the organization comes into being. Through workplace communication, we construct a joint understanding of important work-related issues. Mutual interaction allows us to negotiate the meanings of our joint work and set common goals. Communication is essential for a functional working environment as well. We aim at success, efficiency, and productivity at work by discussing, conversing, debating, and providing and receiving feedback. Hence, when striving to establish a healthy workplace with high levels of well-being and satisfaction, we have to understand the dynamics of workplace communication.

Communication is involved in all forms of human cooperation, and it is therefore embedded with versatile meanings. In working life, communication in its broadest sense may bring to mind various institutions, from media corporations to small communication companies. Communication may also refer to social media and information and communication technologies. In organizational contexts, communication may involve such activities as human resources communication, external stakeholder relations, or marketing. Regarding the workplace, however, the focus of communication is on interpersonal relations and social interaction among the members of the workplace. In the various settings of our daily work, communication ranges from internal informing to problem-solving, from leadership communication to teams and groups, and from strategic decision-making to colleagues’ informal discussions over coffee or lunch. This book is about workplace communication in all its dynamics and variability.

Even though there is a long tradition of research on interpersonal communication in private life settings, the overarching interpersonal approach to workplace communication adopted here is still novel. This book contributes to the understanding of working life by reviewing and analyzing the knowledge of interpersonal communication in the workplace. Not too long ago, it was customary to refer to employees’ mutual interaction as “informal communication,” “the grapevine,” or “corridor conversations.” From the leaders’ or managers’ point of view, employees’ conversations about organizational issues were regarded as unimportant or even harmful, because such conversations do not necessarily fall in line with “official communication.” Today we know better. It is indeed through interpersonal communication that people become aware of each other, build connections to other people, construct and maintain relations with them, and develop a sense of belonging to the same social system. In this book, this social system in question is the shared workplace.

By workplace, people often mean the physical environment where the work is performed. Formerly, workplace interactions were viewed as communication situations involving coworkers in the same geographical location. However, changes in working life have altered our perceptions about the workplace. Work can be done at different times and in different locations, and the associated interactions can be face-to-face, technology-mediated, or both. In particular, the fragmentation of organizational structures, the increase in international networking, and remote, mobile, and flexible work have enriched our understanding of where work can take place. We can also no longer assume that our closest colleagues will be those working in close geographic proximity. Instead, a close coworker may carry out their work remotely, even in another country or continent. Therefore, the workplace is here understood as the experienced workplace, consisting of work-related connections, relationships, teams, and groups. Coworkers convene on the basis of work tasks, in meetings, and in other kinds of face-to-face and technology-mediated settings. Both of the latter are explored in this book.

For many, the workplace is a community of coworkers. At work, we hope to feel a sense of belonging and togetherness, and we expect to have opportunities to share goals and values with others. Viewing the workplace as a community highlights its members’ positive attitudes and commitment. Hence, the workplace is a small or large group of people who

• are interdependent;
• exert a mutual influence on each other;
• share work goals and task;
• cooperate with each other in completing and achieving them.

Coworkers often trust, care about, and support each other. However, the workplace as a community rarely can exist without disputes, conflicts, and problematic relationships. Managing them is a challenge for all organizations. This book focuses on both the positive and negative phenomena of workplace communication.

Workplaces are situated in many kinds of organizations, from small start-up companies to global corporations, and from public, nonprofit, institutional organizations to small and medium-sized enterprises. The context of the workplace is manifold. Obviously, the form and structure of a given organization have various effects on workplace communication. Challenges in communication appear in different forms in different organizations. Employees may work full-time, part-time, or in shifts. They may have permanent or fixed-term contracts, or they may be engaged in projects or on-demand platform work. In addition, the workplace can be a stable community with low employee turnover and long-term coworkers, or it can be a loose network with constantly changing workmates.

At the workplace level, however, interpersonal relationships between members, communication in groups and teams, and all other forms of social interaction in the work community are of vital integrative importance. Functional difficulties encountered in daily work do not usually originate from unsuitable structures of the organization. Neither do they stem from bad chemistry between people or coworkers being unmanageable or too different from one another. Instead, such difficulties often result either from the untapped potential of communication or imperfect communication practices.

This book concentrates especially on communication in knowledge-based work. Knowledge work is generally characterized by the use, creation, and sharing of expert knowledge. It involves processing nonroutine tasks and problems, which require nonlinear, creative, and improvement-oriented thinking. Usually, knowledge work involves problem-solving, cooperation, networking, substantial use of information and communication technology (ICT), and learning in the workplace (Reinhardt, Schmidt, Sloep, & Drachsler 2011). Knowledge workers may be traditional academic professionals (e.g., in health care, education, social service, academia), or they may be qualified experts in various novel fields of work, such as in occupations developed along the advances of ICT (Carvalho & Santiago 2016). However, the notion of knowledge work can easily be extended to cover all kinds of nonroutine work that requires communication, knowledge, and learning.

This book offers concepts, structures, and explanations related to issues that all knowledge workers experience in their workplace. The book’s aim is to open an inquiry into the phenomena of interpersonal communication and social interaction: What they are, what research says about them, and what their impact on workplace communication is.

Creating Realities and Coordinating Meanings

Interpersonal communication is about producing and interpreting messages – and simultaneously about making sense of and managing social situations. The goal of mutual encounters is usually to build and coordinate a fluid and consistent interaction. Interaction is constructed in successive reciprocal messages created by means of verbal and nonverbal codes. Communication is sometimes understood as a transmission of information through the sending and receiving of messages. This transmission perspective limits communication to delivering information from a source to a receiver through input, process, and output. Although the linear transmission model is appealing and may sometimes be useful, because it can encourage attention to building and conveying messages carefully and effectively, this model clearly oversimplifies the dynamics of communication in the context of daily work. This book is based on the constitutive perspective of communication. (For an overview of the many traditions of communication theory, see Craig and Muller 2007.)

The constitutive perspective of communication emphasizes the process of creating, interpreting, and negotiating shared meanings in interaction. Communicators do not separately occupy the roles of sender and receiver; rather, they simultaneously constitute the social process of communication. In an interpersonal relationship, for example, communication does not take place between communicators, but the relationship exists because communication takes place – relationships are communication (Manning 2014). Communication is not only about expressing social realities; instead, it is the central means of creating them. The constitutive approach to communication acknowledges that communication creates, maintains, and shapes our social worlds, including our relationships (Baxter 2004). Participants in interpersonal communication make sense of the situation and its components – including fellow participants and their messages, past interactions with them, and the goals of the current interaction – by imputing meanings to them. Meaning is indeed the basic unit of communication and a primary source of human action (Drazin, Glynn, & Kazanjian 1999). In interactions, we react and respond to meanings. At the same time, we perceive both our own and our partner’s actions as part of the larger social world.

Meanings are coordinated in social interaction. Coordination is an implicit or explicit process in which parties provide and express potential interpretations of elements of the interaction (including the content of the messages; speech acts such as statements, opinions, questions, compliments, and promises; the ways in which participants speak; relationships; situational features) and other parties either accept the interpretations or provide new ones. This process is called the coordinated management of meaning (Pearce 2007; Pearce & Cronen 1980). Achieving shared meanings is not always easy, because we bring certain personal meanings to the interaction. However, interactions are fundamentally about searching for interpersonal meanings (Cushman & Whiting 1972). In the workplace, we sometimes devote a great deal of our time to striving for shared meanings and negotiating them. We can certainly participate in interactions without reaching actual mutual understanding, but in meaningful relationships with close co-workers, or in the face of issues considered central and valuable in the workplace, establishing meanings shared by all participants is of vital importance.

In social interaction, participants seek to understand how to define the communication situation and how to act according to related social expectations. In these situations, communicators apply frames. Frames are socially constructed structures of meanings that are used as “schemata of interpretations” (Goffman 1974, 21). Interactional frames are socially constructed premises of situations and of the behavioral expectations associated with them, and these structures are then represented in interaction (Dewulf et al. 2009). Frames help people organize the expectations related to a social situation (Goffman 1974) when they are seeking interpretive cues (Bateson 1972). Different frames generate different courses of action. For instance, in interprofessional interaction, different professional frames produce different interpretations of the content of current issues and their importance for the work processes. This variability often leads to misunderstandings or disagreements. Achieving a shared reality requires that both frames and the meanings arranged in them are discussed.

Task-Related, Relational, and Identity Dimensions of Workplace Interaction

Communication is a multidimensional process in which task-related, relational, and identity goals appear at the same time (Clark & Delia 1979). In social interaction, meanings are simultaneously imputed to tasks, mutual relationships, and communicators’ identities. In the workplace, it is obvious that task-related communication is essential to the work. Employees communicate to achieve their work goals, that is, to obtain information, solve problems, and make plans. They create and negotiate meanings associated with their work in order to develop a mutual understanding of it. This kind of task-oriented communication is the foundation of work in knowledge-based organizations.

Workplace communication is characterized by the principle of collaboration. Collaboration enables the pursuit of objectives that are often complex and demanding. In fact, managing the objectives of work is an important function of workplace interaction, because in communication the objectives are made sense of and become shared. Other important task-related functions include knowledge sharing, knowledge management, idea generation, problem-solving, and decision-making, as well as managing disagreements. These functions are actualized in both face-to-face encounters and digital environments characterized by technology-mediated communication.

When discussing work-related tasks, participants also pursue their relational goals and create meanings for their mutual relationships. This is called relational communication (Parks 1977). It occurs simultaneously with task-related issues, and it is enacted by verbal and nonverbal relational messages, such as expressions of appreciation and control, liking and disliking, or closeness and distance. Through relational messages, we interpret how others perceive us, respond to and behave towards us, and view our position. Relational communication plays a major role in building a functional and effective workplace; focusing solely on task-related communication does not produce beneficial workplace communication. For example, creating a supportive working environment and managing conflicts require pertinent relationship-oriented procedures.

The key relational function of interpersonal communication in the workplace is relationship forming and maintenance. Even though workplace communication mostly serves the successful performance of work tasks and the achievement of objectives, it also supports the development of a variety of interpersonal relationships. In knowledge-based work, it is often the case that all the daily tasks are carried out in interpersonal relationships. Relationships are the basic mutual connections in work, but they also construct groups, teams, organizations, and networks. Workplace relationships are indeed manifold: Leader–follower relationships and peer coworker relationships are of course common, and there are also mentoring and supervisory relationships. Some of the relationships may be characterized as workplace friendships, and romantic relationships sometimes develop as well (Sias 2009). Nevertheless, the workplace is a place for work. The primary...