Communication in Organizations

Communication serves a constitutive force in making organizations what they are. While communication can be viewed as merely occurring “within” the organization, communication itself is essential to the creation and maintenance of organizations. Modern research in organizational communication explores this constitutive force of communication as well as the ways downward, upward, and lateral communication patterns determine positive and negative outcomes for both organizations and their members. Supportive, adaptive, and ethical downward communication from organizational leadership enhances members’ productivity and satisfaction while reducing turnover. In addition, candid upward communication from members to management is crucial for detecting and correcting troubles while they remain small and resolvable. Lateral communication through which members make sense of organizational events is key to understanding members’ perceptions, decisions, and behaviors. Finally, new information communication technologies both enable distributed work but also create new and troubling issues for modern work life.

Hotel Interdepartmental Communication: A Case of F&B Service and Sales & Marketing at Mercure Bandung Nexa

This study sought to investigate the communication between the Food & Beverage Department and the Sales & Marketing Department at Mercure Bandung Nexa through the perspective of hotel interdepartmental communication. It was benefited from employing a qualitative method. The data collection was conducted through in-depth interviews with the managers of the two departments and field observations. The data collected was then analyzed and carried out through the elements of communication: people (sender and receiver), message, channel, noise, feedback, and effect. This study found that communication between the two departments goes well to keep the service excellent. Based on the analysis of the elements of communication, the only major obstacle is the sudden event that can disrupt the communication process. This result has brought discussion in the context of excellent service being delivered through the communication between the Food & Beverage Department and Sales & Marketing Department. However, this study is limited in the number of informants. More informants should be involved to gather more reliable and deeper data. After all, this study contributes to enriching the application of Interdepartmental Communication in organizations, especially in a hotel. Keywords: Interdepartmental Communication, F&B Service, Sales & Marketing

Principles and Values of Islamic Communication in Organizations

This chapter discusses Islamic communication principles and values which are ideal for any organizations. The discussion starts by elaborating communication from Islamic point of view. The discussion continues by deliberation on communication values and their relationship with good organization. Some thoughts of Muslims' prominent scholars that are relevant to communication are highlighted to integrate them towards the establishment of an ideal Islamic organization. The deliberations on Islamic values are highlighted through five pertinent values and their roles in building up a solid organization.

As empresas de assessoria de imprensa e os desafios da era digital

The increase in the use of the internet and its tools contributed to the development of communication in organizations, leading Public Relations companies in general, and those dedicated to press relations in particular, to follow this process. The present work addresses this theme focusing its attention on the impact that the internet and digital communication had on Public Relation companies. In particular, this study aims to: understand the impact of the evolution of the internet on the work and functioning of press relations companies; understand how press relations companies are adapting to the changes caused by the internet; understand how these changes have consequences on the type of professional profile sought by press relations companies. A qualitative approach was used, with the administration of a questionnaire with open questions. The sample as composed of three profiles of professionals involved in this phenomenon: professionals from press relations agencies, professionals from companies that are clients of those agencies and a third group formed by specialists in the area of communication. Thus, it was intended to obtain a complementary and comprehensive perspective of this phenomenon. The questionnaire was sent by e-mail making it possible to interview individuals who were in different regions without involving the movement of researchers. As main conclusions it was verified that a considerable part of the participants considered that the development of the online communication brought about a change of old paradigms in which old tools are gradually being abandoned, giving way to new ways of doing. In general, there is an increase in the use of digital channels, implying the adoption of new tools and knowledge. This market reality confirms the perspective found in the literature, in which it is argued that the growth of online communication has led to an evolution in the Public Relations sector, leading professionals to adapt to this new reality by incorporating digital into their practices. The digital age has made possible new forms of segmentation and communication through interaction on social networks, allowing to communicate with audiences in a more targeted and fast way. This evolution fits into the concept of PR 2.0 present in the literature showing a new way of applying PR to communication between companies and audiences. In contrast to the one-way transmission of information that was typical of the mass media, social networks allow two-way and interactive communication. The communication advisory companies must then adapt the communication to the new digital channels, gradually completing a migration to online. As a reaction to these changes, professionals are aware of the need to adapt to the new reality. In this context, most respondents recognized, in many cases, effective implementation of digital communication. This data is in line with other studies carried out with PR professionals who believe that technological innovations will be a significant factor of change in the sector. In this development of new skills and the acquisition of multidisciplinary knowledge, communication professionals inevitably should have a solid education. To this end, universities have an essential role in teaching Public Relations by training professionals who are up-to-date and prepared for market developments.

Communication and Culture in Multinational Organizations

Scholarly work and research on communication in multinational organizations continues to grow, responding to the increase of organizational complexity in a global environment where international teams, initiatives, and joint ventures have become common. Accompanying that growth were efforts to establish a clear focus and define boundaries of organizational communication research, particularly emphasizing multinational organizations. How to define communication in the context of multinational organizations? While a comprehensive review of the answers to this question could yield a handbook of communication in organizations, a clear answer can be given outlining the assumptions and political interests underlying different perspectives and theoretical conceptualizations. Therefore, instead of answering the question of what communication is in multinational organizations, this article follows the question proposed by Stanley Deetz. In The New Handbook of Organizational Communication, edited by Fredric M. Jablin and Linda L. Putnam (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2001), Deetz asks, “What do we see or what are we able to do if we think of organizational communication in one way versus another?” (p. 4). Deetz poses the question in order to better understand our choices of setting boundaries for the study of communication in organizations. Deetz reviews three different ways of conceptualizing communication in organizations. The first one emphasizes the development of organizational communication as a specialized area where departments and associations are organized around it; the second approach views communication as a phenomenon that exists in organizational context; and the third one regards communication as a distinct mode of explaining organizations. Recently there have been burgeoning studies in which communication scholars approach communication in organizations using the third approach. Those studies provide psychological or social-cultural explanations of organizations. This review summarizes several major topics on communication in multinational organizations that have been studied over the years. Rather than providing a comprehensive review of the field, the select perspectives and topics discussed here reflect major research foci and approaches associated with the study of communication in multinational organizations in the last few decades. This discussion also captures the recent shift from classic organizations to knowledge-intensive organizations in the context of 21st-century organizational life.

How Communication in Organizations Is Related to Foci of Commitment and Turnover Intentions

The current study analyzes how two components of perceived organizational communication (vertical and horizontal) are related to employee turnover intentions via three types of affective commitment foci (organization, supervisor, and team). Using second-order confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling techniques with a large cross-sectional dataset ( n = 3,317), our results show that, in line with social cohesion theory, vertical communication (e.g., supportiveness from the organization) is strongly related to affective organizational commitment, whereas horizontal communication (e.g., supportiveness from colleagues) is primarily related to affective team commitment. Additionally, both communication dimensions are related to affective supervisory commitment. Finally, these three foci of affective commitment incrementally explain and differentially mediate the relationship between perceived organizational communication and turnover intention.

Face-to-Face Communication in Organizations

Communication is integral to organizations and yet field evidence on the relation between communication and worker productivity remains scarce. We argue that a core role of communication is to transmit information that helps co-workers do their job better. We build a simple model in which workers choose the amount of communication by trading off this benefit against the time cost incurred by the sender, and use it to derive a set of empirical predictions. We then exploit a natural experiment in an organization where problems arrive and must be sequentially dealt with by two workers. For exogenous reasons, the first worker can sometimes communicate face-to-face with their colleague. Consistently with the predictions of our model, we find that: (1) the second worker works faster (at the cost of the first worker having less time to deal with incoming problems) when face-to-face communication is possible, (2) this effect is stronger when the second worker is busier and for homogenous and closely located teams, and (3) the (career) incentives of workers determine how much they communicate with their colleagues. We also find that workers partially internalise social outcomes in their communication decisions. Our findings illustrate how workers in teams adjust the amount of mutual communication to its costs and benefits.