Strategic Communication and Life in Organizations
by
Charles Lamson
One sense in which organizational communication is strategic involves the actions of individual employees. For more than two thousand years, communication scholars have believed that people communicate most effectively if they adapt their communication strategies to the situations they face. To communicate effectively, employees must be able to analyze the situations they encounter in their organizations, determine which communication strategies are available to them in those situations.
select the best of those strategies and enact them effectively. However, selecting appropriate communication strategies is a complicated process. All organizational situations contain guidelines that tell employees how they are supposed to act and communicate and constraints that tell them how they not to act and communicate. Fortunately, organizational situations also provide resources for acting - potential lines of argument, acceptable forms of persuasive appeal and so on - that allow employees to pursue their goals strategically. Strategies or organizing create particular kinds of organizational situations. As a result, the relative importance of guidelines/constraints and resources differs in different situations, employees have the resources available that they will need to meet at least some of their goals and at least some of their organization's objectives simultaneously. In these cases, choosing productive communication strategies is not particularly difficult.
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For example, one of the most important guidelines/constraints in bureaucratic organizations is that communication should follow the chain of command. That is, subordinates send messages to their immediate supervisors who relay the information to their immediate supervisors, who relay the information to their immediate supervisors is they deem it appropriate to do so and so on. No one goes over his her supervisor's head however, communicating via the chain of command is slow, cumbersome and vulnerable to many kinds of communication breakdowns. As a result, employees who follow this guideline/constraint are likely to feel that they do not know what is going on in their organization, and may even lack the basic information that they need in order to do their jobs.So they learn to compensate for weaknesses in formal chain-of-command communication by forming informal communication networks - links to other employees that allow them to obtain and send information without following the chain of command. By using this strategy, they are able to find out what is going on in the organization, meet their needs for autonomy and ironically make their organization work better then it otherwise would. And in organizations in which the chain-of-command rule is taken very seriously, they learn to hide or disguise their informal networks.
However, in other situations choosing the appropriate communication strategy is more difficult, perhaps impossible. Organizational situations sometimes paralyze employees at least momentarily. One kind of paralysis occurs when the guidelines and constraints in a situation are clear, but the resources available to meet the are unclear unknown or insufficient. For example, an organizational situation may include the command for psychotherapists to do "good work" hospital administrators to cut costs or elementary schoolteachers to stimulate all the students' interests. These guidelines may tell employee what they are supposed to do, but they tell them little about how they are supposed to accomplish the tasks. As a result, employees may become paralyzed while trying to make sense out of their situations and discover the resources that are available to them. A newly graduated student who had become a stockbroker, once called and asked, "What do I do next?" after being given a desk and a "training session" that included only the`comment "I hope you'll like it here. Just don't screw up like George did." This kind of paralyzing situation seems to be common for new employees and has been shown to be a major source of organizational stress.
A more extreme form of paralysis occurs when action is called for but constraint leaves the employee with no available resources. In the Peanuts cartoon, Linus's purpose is to gain the childlike fun that comes from a friendly snowball fight. However, Lucy's comments leave him with both a command to act (dropping a snowball is an act) and no productive way to achieve his purpose. Throwing the snowball will fail; so will not throwing it. Lucy has taken the fun out of the snowball fight and has robbed Linus of any opportunity for meaningful choice.
Organizational situations sometimes parallel the Peanuts situation. Supervisors may find that they have only one position to allocate and two departments that desperately need help, have equally strong claims on the position, and will be justifiably angry if they do not receive it. Subordinates may be told to do one thing by one superior and the opposite by another. They may know that one supervisor has a higher rank than the other and that in their organization they are always expected to follow the orders given by the higher ranking person. However, they may also know that the lower-ranking supervisor might retaliate against them in ways that will never be detected by anyone else if they violate his or her order. Here the subordinate has no realistic options because no available resources are available. Between the two extremes of simple situations and paralyzing ones are those that employees normally face at work: situations that provide a range of options that can serve both the employees' purposes and those of their organizations, situations in which employees can act and communicate strategically.
Finally, strategic choices create, reproduce and in some cases change their guidelines/constraints and resources. For example,bureaucratic strategies of organizing continue to exist only because employees act like bureaucrats. The organizational strategy of making decisions by applying established, written policies and regulations on established policies and regulations and have come to believe that decisions should be made in this way. In doing so, they chose to follow a rule that limits their actions to those prescribed by the organizational situation. And in doing so they use that rule as a resource for managing
*SOURCE: STRATEGIC ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY 6TH ED. BY CHARLES CONRAD AND SCOTT POOLE; PGS. 18-20*
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