Organizational Co-Orientation Theory

Background

The idea of co-orientation is adapted from an important essay by Theodore Newcomb in 1953, which suggested that interaction involves two communicators orienting toward a topic or object of common concern. The communicators, identified by Newcomb as A and B, have attitudes toward each other and toward the topic of interaction, designated X. This triad forms a small co-orientational system called A to B re X, which means A is communicating to B about X. This three-part system may be symmetrical, or balanced, or it may be asymmetrical and out of balance. For example, two coworkers who like one another and share a common attitude toward their boss will find their co-orientation symmetrical, but they will experience imbalance and a strain toward symmetry if they have different attitudes toward the manager.

Newcomb's essay is singularly evocative for a student of organizational communication because organizations are complex systems involving many sets of co-orientation. Seen from this larger perspective, the simple three-part model raises more questions than it answers. The first, and most obvious, is the actual nature of the interpersonal dynamic. Newcomb alluded to some of the factors that might be in play, such as the frequency of interaction. But writing when he did, Newcomb had no methodological tools to investigate the empirical basis of interaction in talk.

Newcomb's article was published only 2 years after the posthumous appearance of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and 2 years before John Austin's William James lectures at Harvard (published only in 1962, again posthumously, as How to Do Things with Words). Both these authors focused their attention on actual talk. By doing so, they made the telling point that communication, at the level of interaction, is intrinsically asymmetrical. Speech is how one person acts on another—exerts influence on him or her to think or behave in some way. Language is not merely a medium for information transmission or for expressing an attitude (although both are involved). At its simplest, Newcomb's three-part system must be expanded to include exerting a claim to authority on the part of the speaker: asserting (or failing to assert) something about the world, what to do about it, and who should do it. To return to our example, the coworkers not only have certain attitudes about their boss, but they use talk to express, explore, and expand their views, attempting to influence others in the process.

As Gregory Bateson had noted in 1935, there are three possibilities of co-orientation (though he did not use this term): symmetry (which, unlike in Newcomb's reading, implies competing claims to authority and thus tends to lead to conflict), complementarity (which implies the submission of one actor to the other), and reciprocity (which supposes [Page 710]a multilayered system of exchange, leading to a more differentiated kind of relationship). Both Newcomb and Bateson saw acts of communication as, to use the former's expression, states of a system. But Newcomb's version lacks the complexity of Bateson's in that equilibrium, for the former, means no more than symmetry of attitude. Bateson's conceptualization, on the other hand, opens the door to a more differentiated analysis of social dynamics. To use Lewin's famous term, the notion of a field of forces structured through interaction takes on additional subtlety. The coworkers in our example not only may change their views through interaction, but also will define their relationship in what they say about their boss and other topics of mutual concern. Further, what they say and do is influenced by and in turn influences a variety of other factors present in the organizational situation.

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