Communication
Communication is powerful: no group or organization can exist without sharing meaning among its members. In this chapter, we’ll analyze communication and ways we can make it more effective.
Communication must include both the transfer and the understanding of meaning. Communicating is more than merely imparting meaning; that meaning must also be understood. It is only thus that we can convey information and ideas. In perfect communication, if it existed, a thought would be transmitted so the receiver understood the same mental picture the sender intended. Though it sounds elementary, perfect communication is never achieved in practice. Increased understanding of the functions and processes of communication can lead to positive changes in organizational behavior.
Functions of Communication
Communication serves five major functions within a group or organization: management, feedback, emotional sharing, persuasion, and information exchange.1 Almost every communication interaction that takes place in a group or organization performs one or more of these functions, and none of the five is more important than any of the others.
Managing Behavior
Communication acts to manage member behavior in several ways. Organizations have authority hierarchies and formal guidelines for employees that guide communication flow. When employees follow their job descriptions or comply with company policies, communication performs a management function. Informal communication controls behavior too. When work groups tease or harass a member who produces too much (and makes the rest of the members look bad), they are informally communicating, and managing, the member’s behavior.
Feedback
Communication creates feedback by clarifying to employees what they must do, how well they are doing it, and how they can improve their performance. We saw this operating in goal-setting theory in Chapter 7. Formation of goals, feedback on progress, and reward for desired behavior all require communication and stimulate motivation.
Emotional Sharing
The workgroup is a primary source of social interaction for many employees. Communication within the group is a fundamental mechanism by which members show satisfaction and frustration. Communication, therefore, provides for the emotional sharing of feelings and fulfillment of social needs. For example, after a White police officer shot an unarmed Black man in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2015, software engineer Carl Jones wanted to process his feelings through talking with his coworkers at his corporation. As a second example, Starbucks had baristas write “Race Together” on coffee cups to start conversations about race relations. In both cases, the initial communications were awkward, so awkward that Starbucks pulled the campaign, but Jones and others have forged solid relationships from their emotional sharing.2
Persuasion
Like emotional sharing, persuasion can be good or bad depending on if, say, a leader is trying to persuade a workgroup to commit to the organization’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives or to, conversely, persuade the workgroup to break the law to meet an organizational goal. These may be extreme examples, but it’s important to remember that persuasion can benefit or harm an organization.
Information Exchange
The final function of communication is information exchange to facilitate decision making. Communication provides the information individuals and groups need to make decisions by transmitting the data needed to identify and evaluate choices.
The Communication Process
Before communication can take place it needs a purpose, a message to be conveyed between a sender and a receiver. The sender encodes the message (converts it to a symbolic form) and passes it through a medium (channel) to the receiver, who decodes it. The result is a transfer of meaning from one person to another.3
Exhibit 11-1 depicts this communication process. The key parts of this model are (1) the sender, (2) encoding, (3) the message, (4) the channel, (5) decoding, (6) the receiver, (7) noise, and (8) feedback.
Exhibit 11-1
The Communication Process
The sender initiates a message by encoding a thought. The message is the actual physical product of the sender’s encoding. When we speak, the speech is the message. When we write, the writing is the message. When we gesture, the movements of our arms and the expressions on our faces are the message. The channel is the medium through which the message travels. The sender selects it, determining whether to use a formal or informal channel. Formal channels are established by the organization and transmit messages that are related to the professional activities of members. They traditionally follow the authority chain within the organization. Other forms of messages, such as those that are personal or social, follow informal channels, which are spontaneous and subject to individual choice.4 The receiver is the person(s) to whom the message is directed, who must first translate the symbols into understandable form. This step is the decoding of the message. Noise represents communication barriers that distort the clarity of the message, such as perceptual problems, information overload, semantic difficulties, or cultural differences. The final link in the communication process is a feedback loop. Feedback is the check on how successful we have been in transferring our messages as originally intended. It determines whether understanding has been achieved.