Key Issues in Organizational Communication
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Key Issues in Organizational Communication

Owen Hargie, Dennis Tourish, Owen Hargie, Dennis Tourish

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Key Issues in Organizational Communication

Owen Hargie, Dennis Tourish, Owen Hargie, Dennis Tourish

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About This Book

It is often said that the practice of management is in crisis, and that managers are now finding it harder than ever to develop strategies which withstand the shocks of the marketplace. This illuminating book cuts through these conflicting issues to show how organizational communication plays a vital role in confronting uncertainty.

Arguing that many managers fail to adequately consider the communication consequences of the decision making process and its impact on organizational effectiveness, Hargie and Tourish present here numerous organizational communication insights, and show how they reveal a way through these dilemmas.Based on cutting-edge research findings and case studies, this book features contributions from the UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand and Norway, bringing multiple perspectives to this topical subject. The result is a comprehensive guide to organizational communication useful for managers, academics and students.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2004
ISBN
9781134508235
Edition
1
1 The Crisis of Management and the Role of Organizational Communication
Dennis Tourish and Owen Hargie
Introduction
What does the future hold for the theory and practice of management? What role, if any, is there for organizational communication in these deliberations? Exactly which aspects of communication contribute centrally to the core of corporate practice? This book addresses itself to these and other key issues. In this chapter our objective is to contextualize the book by examining a number of areas central to this overall ambition.
  • We look at the business context in which most organizations now work. Many if not all are under enormous external pressure. The agenda faced by managers is crowded to breaking point. These pressures sometimes see organizations fragment rather than cohere. A primary focus on the bottom line has often elbowed other considerations, including communication, to the sidelines. In the process, the theory and practice of management has entered into crisis. Many aspects of this crisis are explored in this book, and we showcase some of the main themes in the present chapter.
  • We explore whether organizational communication makes any difference to how organizations function and how their internal relationships are managed. Recent years have seen a voluminous research literature into the human dimensions of organizational functioning. Communication has contributed to this, directly and indirectly. Our discussion of these issues does not presume that all members of organizations share a common set of interests and a readily agreed set of priorities or goals – what some researchers would describe as a ‘unitarist’ or ‘functionalist’ bias. Rather, it is to emphasize that while many management theorists have been developing inclusive agendas of involvement, participation and empowerment, most management practice has been marching to the beat of a different drum, and in the opposite direction.
  • We discuss precisely what we mean by the terms ‘communication’ in general, and organizational communication in particular. Our intention is to alert readers at the outset to the themes that they will find in the chapters to follow. Contributors to this volume repeatedly discuss the communications implications of issues that have been deemed vital to the theory and practice of management. It is essential that readers appreciate the full range of issues implied by any discussion of communication, the better to grasp their full implications.
  • We summarize some key debates in the field concerning the parameters of organization science and organizational communication. Thus, we acknowledge that there is no one agreed agenda guiding communication research, or a single theoretical paradigm that is employed when communication processes are analysed. For example, some researchers adopt a critical management perspective, in which a principal concern is to explore relationships of power and domination. Others pursue a more positivistic agenda, characterized by a search for causal explanations of observable phenomenon. Readers will find a variety of approaches in the text, and are alerted here to some of the main issues involved.
Clearly, therefore, this book is not intended as an introductory text on organizational communication or management. While we outline some basic principles of communication in this chapter, the main thrust of the book is to explore the brutal dilemmas that now confront organizations daily, and illuminate many of the debates engulfing the field from the often neglected perspective of communication studies.
The Business Context of Organizational Communication
Humans are easily tempted to interpret the world as more volatile, fast changing, tempestuous, uncertain and unpredictable than it actually is, and to assert that each of these conditions prevails more than during any other period of history. This seems to be an endemic part of the human condition. As the Bavarian comic Karl Valentin once put it, ‘In the past even the future was better’. We make no such claims. However, this book has been prompted by the realization that society faces many challenges, none more so than in the field of work. Our economy is certainly more globalized than ever before, and therefore prone to sudden shocks inspired by unanticipated events beyond the control of even the most far-seeing manager. To take the most obvious example, the terrorist attacks in New York on 11 September 2001 sent political, social and economic shockwaves around the globe, and helped usher in a period of instability characterized by war with Iraq, sudden stock market fluctuations and a heightened mood of fear that is clearly not conducive to the orderly functioning of business.
The fate of individual companies illustrates the strains most are now exposed to. In 1989 Mitsubishi was a key global player. It even acquired a 51 per cent stake in New York’s Rockefeller Center. This corporate giant, seemingly so infallible, proceeded to lose $330m. in 1999 (Hitt, 2000). Even more famously, IBM was ranked as the number 1 corporation in the US by Fortune magazine in the early 1980s. It featured as one of the ‘excellent’ companies profiled in the bestDselling management book of all time – In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1982). By 1995 it had tumbled to a position of 281 in theFortune 500 – a shadow of its former pre-eminent self. As we write this chapter, sections of the business press have begin to float another previously unthinkable possibility that the Ford Motor Company may be heading for disaster, and even bankruptcy (Wachman, 2003).
But it is more than just the fate of a few individual companies in the US and Japan that is at stake. The technology index peaked in March 2000, but in the following three years £778bn. was wiped from the value of British company shares (Connon, 2003). A period of what had been dubbed ‘irrational exuber-ance’ (Shiller, 2001) shuddered to a halt. Micklewhaite and Wooldridge (2000: 120), two stalwart defenders of globalization, conceded that there existed ‘a universal feeling that every manager now faces a world in which the old certainties have been replaced by a string of unpleasant surprises and in which strategy has devolved from long-term planning to simple panicking.’
These developments, not to mention other famous and notorious debacles such as the Enron scandal, have created what can only be described as a crisis of legitimacy for the profession of management. More evidence has accumulated that many of the most prized organizational interventions spawned by the management theory and guru industry have a limited to non-existent effect on performance. Jackson (2001), in surveying much of the evidence, cited the following dismal data:
  • Of 500 companies studied, only one-third felt that programmes such as Total Quality Management had a significant impact on their profitability.
  • Only 20 out of 100 British firms thought that their adoption of organizational improvement plans improved their financial performance.
  • An analysis of managers in 100 companies looking at 21 different programmes found 75 per cent of managers unhappy with the results.
  • A review of 787 companies around the world found that 70 per cent of managers thought the management tools they were exhorted to use generally promised more than they delivered.
In addition, much attention has been focused on the behaviours of senior executives. There can be no more apposite illustration than Jack Welch, formerly CEO of General Electric (GE), and lauded in some circles (though not by us) as the best corporate leader of the twentieth century. Welch started his retirement in a novel fashion by commencing an extramarital affair with an editor of the Harvard Business Review, who had been sent to interview him. His subsequent divorce brought to light a number of intriguing facts such as that he had amassed a personal fortune of over $900m., while firing tens of thousands of workers, that his retirement package included a $9m. a year pension, plus use of GE’s Boeing 737 and a Central Park apartment, free wine, food, laundry, toiletries, limo services, security, country club memberships, and Wimbledon, Red Sox and Yankee tickets (Helmore and Morgan, 2002). In many senses this epitomized the excesses of the era.
The problems that have arisen from unbridled greed at the top have been widely acknowledged, and not just among ‘the usual suspects’ in the antiglobalization movement. Noted management guru Charles Handy commented gloomily: ‘The danger is that the flaws in the capitalist system may be its undoing, leaving us with something much worse 
 My hope is that we can do something about the flaws in capitalism 
 although I am not optimistic’ (Handy, 2001: 119).
The language used has on occasion been vitriolic. Leading management thinker Henry Mintzberg offered the following opinion: ‘We live in a crazy world. It’s totally scandalous. In the US business has literally bought its way into government 
 We’ve gone completely out of balance 
 At the moment everything is totally imbalanced towards business: it completely dominates the social and government sectors too’ (Caulkin, 2003: 10).
The data is compelling. Eighty-six per cent of the stock market gains of the 1990s went to only 10 per cent of the population, cementing the power of business and making the US the most unequal society in the world apart from Nigeria (Handy, 2001). Social cohesion has been seriously wounded. One of the most interesting books dealing with this (the evocatively entitled Bowling Alone), argued forcefully that Americans had seen a drastic collapse of honesty and trust, because of the rise of crude individualism and the consequent erosion of vital social networks (Putnam, 2001).
Perhaps inevitably, the theoretical basis of management has also been called into question. Traditionally, management was viewed as a process involving planning, organizing, commanding, controlling and co-ordinating (Fayol, 1949). These and other certainties (for example unity of direction, unity of command and a clear chain of authority) may well have been appropriate in a stable environment, but seem less applicable in the context of virtual, e-commerce and service oriented companies, all competing in a globalized economy (Harvey and Buckley, 2002). More recent management thinkers have advocated a culture of empowerment (or liberation), on the basis that the new knowledge economy requires the active, willing and creative contribution of a workforce to an organization’s bottom line (see Collins, 2000, for an account and critique). The stimulus for such ideas has been provided by changes in the economy.
More than half of the total GDP in rich economics is now derived from what is defined as knowledge-based work, while knowledge workers account for eight out of ten new jobs (Dess and Picken, 2000). These authors conclude that ‘to compete in the information age, firms must increasingly rely on the knowledge, skills, experience, and judgment of all their people. The entire organization, collectively, must create and assimilate new knowledge, encourage innovation, and learn to compete in new ways in an ever-changing competitive environment’ (Dess and Picken, 2000: 18).
Ideas of empowerment naturally follow – people’s willing involvement in job tasks, necessary for the innovation required by knowledge-oriented firms, presumes some measure of autonomy and discretion over what they do. Moreover, when at work, people generally prize the ability to realize their full potential as individuals (Mitroff and Denton, 1999), to do work that has some social meaning or social value (Ashmos and Duchon, 2000), and to enjoy the feeling of being part of a larger community (Mirvis, 1997). They also aspire to live and work in an integrated fashion (Pfeffer, 2001). None of these needs is likely to be met in an authoritarian environment.
The problem, however, is clear. It is one thing to stress the need for empowerment. Whether it can thrive in an environment that Mintzberg describes as ‘crazy’, in which most business leaders still instinctively respond to problems with a strong need to command and control, in which corporations are widely regarded as having too much power, and in which senior executives are ridiculed for their pay and benefits is another matter.
Frequently, these paradoxes have been disregarded by management theorists. It is often assumed that management is ‘the rational administration of unitary organizations. Organizations are assumed to be social technologies, or “tools”, systematically designed in order to attain specific goals’ (Thomas, 2003: 29). Moreover, where it is addressed at all, power is most often discussed simply as ‘a matter of strategic resource control or illegitimate moves in the legitimate organization game’ (Clegg, 2003: 537), rather than as the exercise of control over one person or group by others. It is thus implied that organizations are geared to the achievement of ends that are both socially useful and generally shared – assumptions that in truth are ever more widely contested. Within this framework, a variety of management gurus produce recipes for organizational success, with all the panache of a magician who performs miracles – aided by smoke, mirrors, and his audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. Senior managers are urged to pursue the latest miracle cure through a process that is ninetenths diktat to one-tenth persuasion. In reality, such has been the ferocity of life in the workplace over recent years that most employees greet such efforts with ‘a healthy mixture of confusion, scepticism and even cynicism’ (Miles, 2001: 317). It is not insignificant that one of the most widely read writers on organizations is Scott Adams, whose Dilbert cartoons depict a workforce constantly bombarded by brainless management initiatives devoid of any real sense. Nevertheless, many practising managers eagerly embrace each new development, however untested its assumptions might be (Harvey and Buckley, 2002).
Thus, we regularly see the appearance of management prescriptions fatally hobbled by their own internal contradictions. It is quite common to find gurus (and others) advocating such approaches as participation, and yet creating programmes ‘whose successful implementation depends upon the use of hierarchy, unilateral control, and employee limited freedom’ (Argyris, 2001: x). For example, Beer and Eisenstat (2000) identified a number of barriers to organizations effectively implementing their chosen strategies – what they dubbed ‘the silent killers’. Among the killers listed is a top-down or laissez-faire senior management style, which stops those at the top receiving enough corrective input to the decision making process. Their recommended solution, however, ‘starts with the top team of the business unit or corporation defining its strategy’, (Beer and Eisenstat, 2000: 30), and then proceeding to sell it down the line. A unitarist focus is simply assumed, and a top-down strategy recommended – as part of the attempt to move organizations beyond top-down strategies.
It is our belief, and a driving force behind this book, that such paradoxes could be addressed more effectively if communication theory – concerned as it is with how meaning is formed and then shared between people – was more often incorporated into the analysis. However, it seemed to us that a great deal of the general writing on management has neglected to fully incorporate a study of the communication processes involved. Where communication is acknowledged at all it is frequently addressed in passing, and more often with the assumption that it is a phenomenon that is self-explanatory and hence one that requires no deeper level of analysis. Likewise, in many organizations, communication is recognized as being important but little or nothing is done about it. The attitude seems to be that the formal recognition and endorsement of the need for better communication will somehow, by a process of osmosis, bring it to pass. This emu-like approach to strategic communication is of course doomed to failure. A major objective of this text is to showcase the importance of devoting time and resources to communication. It is also our intention to address this issue by building some much-needed bridges between two often disparate fields of study – management and organizational communication.
Communication and Organizational Effectiveness
Communication is central to any study of what managers do, and to the effectiveness or otherwise of organizations. Managers devote much of their time to interactions with staff. Manager-watching studies have revealed that they spend over 60 per cent of their working time in scheduled and unscheduled meetings with others, about 25 per cent doing desk-based work, some 7 per cent on the telephone, and 3 per cent ‘walking the job’ (Schermerhorn, 1996).
These activities are embedded in dense networks of relationships between managers and employees. Most such communication is face-to-face, and most of it is task-related rather than personal in content. Managers spend much of their day communicating with many people, in brief interactions which are nevertheless of enormous significance in determining the communication and cultural climate of their organizations (Tourish and Hargie, 2000a). Effective management depends on open communication, and requires an interpersonal style characterized by warmth, candour, supportiveness and a commitment to dialogue rather than monologue. Indeed, it has also been shown that ‘communication, especially oral skills, is a key component of success in the business world 
 executives who hire college graduates believe that the importance of oral communication skills for career success is going to increase’ (O’Hair et al., 2002: 3). No wonder that Mintzberg (1989: 18), having surveyed a wide range of evidence, drew the following conclusion: ‘The manager does not leave meetings or hang up the telephone in order to get back to work. In large part, communication is his or her work.’
Research findings have long suggested that the effective management of communication processes brings large-scale organizational benefits. In a review of the research, Clampitt and Downs (1993) concluded that the benefits obtained from quality internal communications include:
  • improved productivity
  • reduced ab...

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