Management of Corporate Communication

From Interpersonal Contacts To External Affairs

Robert L. Heath

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000149111
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Whereas many organizational communication texts address internal communication processes, few consider the efforts that companies expend to communicate with external stakeholders. Likewise, many texts that concentrate on public relations or advertising consider external communication, but fail to give attention to internal communication. Combining both points of view, this text explains how an entire organization operates through enactments of personnel and external stakeholders. Central to this book is a concern for meaning and its influence on the performance of jobs in response to expectations of co-workers and external publics. The concept of narrative is used to explain how individual and organization performance is the expression of personae that are best when enacted jointly -- in varying degrees of coordination -- to satisfy mutual performance expectations. Narrative explains the power of organizational meaning, interpersonal contacts, group performance, stakeholder negotiation, and internal and external organizational zones of meaning -- assumptions that are shared by people who enact an organization through coordinated efforts.

1

Managing Communication in Companies: An Enactment Point of View

A century ago companies began to increase in size. Many of them became large, complex, and bureaucratic, often employing thousands of workers. Whereas workers had once toiled alongside a boss who participated in and directed their efforts, the advent of large companies—especially investor-owned corporations—required that employees’ work be supervised to bring success to their employer if not to themselves. Whether by art or science, managers in large businesses were required to plan and coordinate these operations. As is true of all instances when humans band together to amplify their individual efforts, communication was instrumental in the endeavor of managers to direct activities needed to create, produce, and sell products or to provide services.

Early management theories assumed bosses should be dominant, paternal, and rational in the use of communication to direct employees’ work. The body of knowledge relevant to that managerial philosophy can be reduced to one directive: Give instructions clearly and firmly. From that limited beginning, research and theory progressed to explain the impact organizations have on how people communicate and why communication helps or harms organizations (Morgan, 1986; Redding, 1985; Richetto, 1977).

Management philosophy advanced when researchers demonstrated that human relations help employees feel good about their work, themselves, and the organization. Building on that advice, the human resources approach resulted when managers and researchers recognized the importance of involving employees in the design and execution of work; it acknowledged that bosses cannot control workers. Revolutionizing management theory, human resources shifted the locus of control from the exclusive domain of managers toward a cooperative balance between bosses and employees. A recent version of this approach reduces organizational excellence and productivity to the axiom “Work smarter, not harder.” That approach to management treats employees and organizational processes as being thoughtful (Jablin, 1982a; Morgan, Frost, & Pondy, 1983; Pacanowsky & O’Donnell-Trujillo, 1983; Pondy & Boje, 1980; Sackmann, 1990; Weick, 1979a; Weick & Browning, 1986).

Even though people who enact companies are thoughtful, they are not always rational. As Shrivastava, Mitroff, and Alvesson (1987) reasoned, ‘The assumption that organizations are rational entities is an unnecessary and mystifying limitation that obscures important aspects of organizing” (p. 90). Organizational behavior is thoughtful even though people do not continually and “consciously select a set of means to achieve predetermined ends with optimal or at least satisfying results” (p. 90).

This brief overview highlights two goals that motivate organizational studies. One is to make organizations effective, productive tools by which people achieve personal, collective, and societal ends. An understanding of communication can help managers and their personnel coordinate efforts needed to achieve their company’s mission. In the past two decades, productivity improvement has been a catchword in the struggle to invigorate U.S. companies’ ability to deliver quality goods and services at prices that compete domestically and internationally. The Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award symbolizes a renewed commitment to improve individual, corporate, and national competitiveness.

A second goal of organizational studies is to increase people’s happiness in organizations—to empower them and give them the personal satisfaction that their time is well spent. The study of organizational communication should rivet on the fact that companies are tools by which people do what they cannot do by themselves. To avoid the personal side of organizational life ignores a dominant motive for studying human communicative behavior: to understand how people make choices and act in ways that benefit them and affect the success of organizations in which they work.

The challenge facing the savvy manager and employee is to work smart and get others to do the same. This daunting challenge requires insight into organizational communication performance, skills, and processes. The prize for such insight, as Sypher and Zorn (1986) discovered, is greater likelihood of success in companies. Upward mobility is associated with superior cognitive skills and communication abilities: self-monitoring, perspective taking, and persuasiveness. Self-monitoring refers to self-awareness, thinking of what one is doing and how. Perspective taking is the ability to see an issue, situation, another person, or oneself from other people’s points of view. Persuasion consists of the ability to influence thoughts and actions—to make requests that others grant.

The focal point of organizational communication analysis is the acts people perform that are meaningful for themselves and others, along with their thoughts about organizing and working. To that end, this book integrates theory, research, and commonplace observation needed to help persons work smart on behalf of themselves, their work units, and an organization. Scholarly inquiry can help people become empowered with attitudes and skills needed to lead rewarding organizational lives—a worthy goal, because at least one third of many people’s lives is devoted to work.

Research and theory featured in this analysis draw on empirically derived conclusions and on interpretative insights into organizational rhetoric. Although some writers stress the differences between these lines of analysis, they are treated here as partners for what each can contribute to our understanding. That blend of inquiry lets us understand how, why, and what people communicate, what they communicate about, what they think, and how communication relates to productivity and quality of performance. To appreciate the dynamics of organizational life, we must understand the skills, processes, and meaningful impact of communication in companies. At the heart of this analysis is an interest in knowing how people in companies create and enact meaning, a sense-making approach to the study of organizational performance. This chapter provides rationale for that approach to the study of organizational communication.

Toward Effective Organizations Through Communication

People who manage and work in companies and other complex organizations are expected to be productive and achieve high quality outcomes. Productivity entails the ratio of input to output; as material and human resources expended to achieve individual and organizational output decline, productivity increases. Quality deals with levels of performance outcome measured in ability to meet or exceed customer and other stakeholder expectations. It responds to the current indictment that U.S.-made products are inferior to those of foreign competitors. Improving organizational effectiveness centers on factors that increase employees’ ability and willingness to be effective.

People are the heart, soul, and sinew of companies; through communication and the creation of meaning, they coordinate and focus their efforts. Each company results from what people think and do—in the sense that what they do has communicative force. People use communication as a tool to accomplish individual and collective goals and obtain rewards. In addition to using communication to influence others, people are affected by it in how they perceive themselves, the expectations they have regarding work and rewards, and their opinion of the company.

What the organization is and becomes—how it thinks and operates—is the product of collective efforts. A company is the manifestation of individual and collective needs and efforts. Thus, the study of organizational communication examines how each company constitutes a context that affects people’s personal and organizational lives. Organizational research makes people the focal point of analysis and reasons that each company is the product of individual interactions and relationships.

Members of companies want to be efficacious, to be rewarded for their effort, and to feel that what they do is of value. People may have their own peculiar notions of what efficacy entails, and their definition may differ from that of their boss. Persons outside of companies want to be efficacious, to associate with companies—as customers or vendors for instance—in ways that lead to positive outcomes. People increase their efficacy by creating or joining organizations; they “buy” their way into organizations through what they do and say. Success is communicated as rewards or punishments, outcomes more likely to be favorable if people act as expected.

Communication is a variable taken for granted so that much of what employees do each workday may not seem to depend on their ability to communicate but rather on their performance of work tasks, such as operating machines, making architectural designs, selling hamburgers, or creating and storing information. However, even when people do not overtly and intentionally engage in communication, what they do—such as operate a machine—and how they do it serves as information and has impact on other people, internal and external to each organization. Actions are meaningful and speak loudly; communication occurs when the actions of one person affect another.

Rather than assuming organizational effectiveness is achieved by advising managers on ways to communicate with employees, this book seeks insights that can be used to help individuals cooperate strategically to achieve mutually satisfying outcomes on behalf of themselves and the companies in which they work. Such analysis must acknowledge that people have different goals and values, and negotiate relationships fraught with conflict that demands resolution.

This realization forces us to consider whether a company can be designed properly so that employees—like rats in a maze—will be happy and productive. Rather than being manipulated or controlled, people—regardless of their level within a company—must feel encouraged to operate effectively on its behalf. If a person works correctly to help an organization, the individual expects to be rewarded appropriately and fairly. Distribution of rewards constitutes communication. In addition to material rewards, a sense of achievement can be communicated to employees in many ways, often so subtle that they are hard to identify. Rewards are subject to individual interpretation and, although they should, may not be mutually recognized throughout the company.

Given these assumptions, where should we look in our search to explain organizational effectiveness? Recent studies have argued that meaning—the sense people make of themselves and their circumstances—has an enormous impact on how people come to know which acts to perform on behalf of themselves and their organizations. Stressing this point, Eisenberg (1986) reasoned that organizations are best understood “as the ongoing evolution and negotiation of meaning” (p. 88). Language affects behavior—that of each person and of those he or she influences—and it is a key part of cognition. How actions and events are interpreted is vital to organizational communication. For instance, persons’ reaction to stress depends on their interpretation of which events are stressful. They are more tolerant of events they believe they have cognitive or behavioral control over, a belief they will not face an event beyond their limits of endurance. Coping also depends “on the meaning of control for the person undergoing the aversive event” (S. C. Thompson, 1981, p. 98).

A communication-oriented approach to understanding human thought and behavior in organizations must analyze dynamic interaction processes and feature language and meaning as the materials about which people think and with which they make judgments and know which enactments to make. This point is brought into focus by realizing that enactments cannot be random or without meaning if they are to allow people to engage in the activity of organizing. On a day-by-day basis, as people interact, they gain insight into what is going on in each organization—its priorities and expectations often expressed in reward systems. This information is presented in countless conversations, memos, meetings, and corporate communication vehicles, such as employee newsletters. Each organization comes alive and becomes meaningful through communication.

How do successful organizations differ from unsuccessful ones? Ability to control, plan, coordinate, and direct actions are some of the reasons, along with mental factors needed to perform insightful, astute observation, and innovative analysis. Taking that view, Weick (1979a) argued that companies are thinking organisms, obtaining and interpreting information correctly and wisely to maximize opportunities and minimize costs. Thoughtfulness culminates in the creation and execution of organizational and departmental missions. Articulation of thoughts results in shared meaning that guides actions of managers and employees. However, thoughtful planning fails to result in proper execution of business strategies unless organizational members are supportively interlocked with one another. The quality of relationships determines how well the people obtain and use information for planning, strategic management, and operations.

Drawing conclusions about quality organizations is easy, but knowing how to implement them is difficult because explanations of why people act as they do can become a tangle of variables and generalizations. Attempts to derive research-based conclusions people can use to guide their behavior, including communication activities, are frustrated by qualifications; what works under one condition may not work under all circumstances. One objective of organizational studies, then, must be to reduce complex issues to manageable observations that are theoretically sound, testable through research, and built around variables that truly make a difference. This reduction, however, must avoid the kind of simplicity characteristic of lists of “do’s and don’ts” of effective management.

Useful generalizations about organizational performance have resulted from the growing interest in organizational culture (Kelly, 1985; Pacanowsky & O’Donnell-Trujillo, 1982). Culture influences behavior because it contains the social reality people use to know what they are expected to do—the expectations others hold—and what rewards and punishments result from individual and collective efforts. Members join together to perform activities needed to achieve their goals, to do what they cannot accomplish by themselves. Not all activities in an organization are equally appropriate and rewardable. Culture defines which act is appropriate and which is not so that people can coordinate their efforts.

Culture leads people to share a vocabulary that carves reality—physical and social—into meaningful units. Thus, they hold similar views. By adopting the idiom (including specialized jargon) unique to each organizational culture, employees take on the social reality of culture and think in its terms. In that way, they come to know what is expected of them, what they should expect of others, and how relationships are defined and rewarded. Themes unique to each company give its members a sense of structure and mission.

Members do not need to have identical thoughts or know the same information for a company to function properly, but they must share key principles and themes. As Morgan (1986) advised, “Any realistic approach to organizational analysis must start from the premise that organizations can be many things at one and the same time” (p. 321). Each culture reflects the unique traits of each company—its information systems, politics, ideology, machine-like quality, and ability to produce social change. Each company consists of subcultures that are adequately blended into a unifying culture. Subcultures may complement one another, or lead to conflict and confusion. This realization led Van Maanen and Barley (1985) to point out that “structural ironies and normative tensions between groups are facts of life in most organizations” (p. 48). To be productive and achieve excellence, individuals who make up a company must blend their differences into a coherent and focused whole. Enactment theory explains how this is accomplished.

Enactment Theory

To capture the dynamism of the people who bring companies to life, enactment theory treats life in general and organizations in particular as an undirected play (Pearce & Cronen, 1980). Noting this dynamism, Deetz (1982) concluded: “Individuals and organizations are constantly in the process of self-formation” (p. 141). To form themselves into an organization, personnel “achieve stability through the enactment of interaction cycles and the subsequent development of rules and recipes for appropriate behavior” (Eisenberg, 1986, p. 89). In this way, enactment theory captures the thoughtful processes that people require to achieve continuity and coordination. It makes explicit the roles and rules that grow from expectations people share to predict and coordinate their activities with one another. This metaphor embraces the strateg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• LEA’s Communication Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Managing Communication in Companies: An Enactment Point of View
• 2 Coordination Through Meaningful Expectations
• 3 Narrative, Enactment, and Organizational Discourse
• 4 Information: Uncertainty Reduction, System, and Satisfaction
• 5 Managing as Symbolic Action: Enacting Interpretations in Organizational Settings
• 6 Companies as Negotiated Enactment of Stakeholder Interests
• 7 Interpersonal Contacts: Enacting with Boss and Others
• 8 Networks: Many People Speaking with a Single Voice
• 9 Markets, Images, Issues, and External Stakeholders
• 10 External Communication with Public Policy Stakeholders
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index