Organizational Communication

Conceptual Overview

Although it entered into use in corporate speaking courses in 1929, the term organizational communication was not officially coined until the 1950s. Three main areas form the foundation of the field—studies of corporate public speeches, research on the accuracy and readability of written communication, and comparisons of written and oral media. From the popular Dale Carnegie courses, corporate executives learned to link managerial effectiveness to communication skills. This demand for communication training called for research on speaking and writing and the evolution of organizational communication as a field of study.

W. Charles Redding, often regarded as the father of organizational communication, claimed that the field emerged as a distinct entity when scholars separated the applied areas of business and industrial communication from the research on organizational communication. Specifically, the field crystallized at a conference held in 1967 at the Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama, at which several scholars delivered state-of-the-art reviews of theory and research in organizational communication. From the outset, then, the field incorporated both a practical and a research agenda. The practical agenda focused on improving communication processes in the work-place, and the research agenda aimed to uncover the complexity and nature of organizational communication. Research centered on how organizational communication worked, what it meant, and how different perspectives revealed different insights into the field.

Scholars have embraced different images of what organizational communication is. These differences stem from the use of particular elements of communication as their focal point. Each image embodies a corresponding view of organizations. In the 1960s and 1970s, researchers treated communication as transmission and organizations as conduits in which members sent and received messages. The transmission image treats communication as an arrow sent to a target, typically through a one-way flow. Described as a tube or cylinder, the conduit, as Stephen Axley observed, was the most common view of organizational communication, one that was often signaled by the use of such terms as exchanged messages, relayed, and conveyed. In this image, words contained information, and listeners extracted ideas from the transmission. Since receivers were treated as passive and reactive, organizational communication was cast as [Page 1032]easy and effortless—as simply “getting your message across.” Breakdowns in communication occurred when the information was blocked or the message received was not what the sender intended.

Using this image, investigators examined the downward flow of information from top managers to employees, the upward flow from employees to supervisors, and the horizontal flow to individuals at the same organizational level. Studies revealed that individuals condensed and simplified messages as they transmitted them downward, often filtering out vital information. A key finding about upward communication was that bad news rarely traveled upward because individuals often blocked the flow of information so that they would “look good” to their supervisors. In traditional bureaucracies, very little information flowed horizontally across the organization; thus, individuals at the top of the hierarchy bore the burden of coordinating across units. At all levels, employees complained about a lack of useful information related to their jobs, yet ironically, they suffered from information overload and too much irrelevant information. Scholars have also investigated the adequacy of information flow during organizational changes. Studies have revealed that a large amount of information exchanged during a corporate merger often leads to anxiety whereas that same amount during downsizing fosters high job satisfaction.

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