History of Organizational Communication

Rebekah Bennetch; Corey Owen; Zachary Keesey; Katie Wheeler; Lina Rawlings

History of Organizational Communication

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

Stanley Deetz explains the three ways the term “organizational communication” can be understood.
Define the term “organizational communication” as it is used within this book.
Identify some of the significant historical events in the creation of the field of organizational communication.

Now that we’ve examined what “communication” means in this book and what an “organization” is, let’s switch gears and discuss the nature of “organizational communication.” To help us understand what the term “organizational communication ” means, we’ll explore differing ways of viewing it and then a basic conceptual definition that we will use in this book.

What is Organizational Communication?

Understanding organizational communication helps you understand an organization’s communication flow and ways to grow your competence as a communicator.

Ways of Viewing Organizational Communication

Stanley Deetz argues that defining what is meant by the term “organizational communication” is only half the question. “A more interesting question is, ‘What do we see or what are we able to do if we think of organizational communication in one way versus another?’ Unlike a definition, the attempt here is not to get it right but to understand our choices” (Deetz, 2001, p. 4). Instead, Deetz recommends that we attempt to understand the three conceptualizations that are available to “organizational communication” scholars and students: the discipline, ways to describe organizations, and a phenomenon within organizations.

Organizational Communication as a Discipline

The first term, “organizational communication,” is commonly used as a descriptor tool that refers to a specific subdivision of the communication field. However, organizational communication is not an academic area of study unique to the field of communication studies. Because organizational communication is a distinct discipline, it is supported by a range of courses, books, and degrees that focus on studying it. According to Dennis K. Mumby and Cynthia Stohl (1996), “A community of scholars constitutes a disciplinary matrix when they share a set of paradigmatic assumptions about the study of a certain phenomenon” (p. 52). In essence, organizational communication is a discipline because people who study it share a common conception of the study of “organizational communication.” Mumby and Stohl (1996) go on to note that “This does not mean that there is a consensus on every issue, but rather that scholars see objects of study in similar ways, and use the same language game in describing these phenomena” (p. 52). You may find that your teacher or even yourself disagree with our interpretation of certain aspects of organizational communication, which is a regular part of any academic discipline.

Organizational Communication as a Descriptor

The second way we can view the term “organizational communication” is as a descriptor for the activities that occur within organizations. Deetz (2001) explains, “to think of communication as a way to describe and explain organizations. In the same way that psychology, sociology, and economics can explain organizations’ processes, communication might also be considered a distinct mode of explanation or way of thinking about organizations” (p. 5). As you will quickly see in this book, organizational communication, as it has been studied in the past and continues to be studied today, is a hybrid field, meaning that researchers from various academic areas investigate the topic. Researchers in anthropology, business, psychology, sociology, and other academic fields conduct fundamental research on organizational communication. Communication scholars differ in how we approach organizational communication because our training is first, and foremost, in human communication, so we bring a unique history and set of tools to the study of organizational communication that other scholars do not possess.

Organizational Communication as a Phenomenon

The final way to view the term “organizational communication” is to view it as a specific phenomenon or set of phenomena within an organization. For example, when two employees get into a conflict at work, they enact organizational communication. When the chief financial officer of an organization delivers a PowerPoint presentation on the latest quarterly earnings to its board of directors, they engage in organizational communication. The newest advertisement campaign that an organization has created for the national media is another example of organizational communication.

A Conceptual Definition of Organizational Communication

The definition we will use for organizational communication in this book stems primarily from Deetz’s third view of “organizational communication.” We define organizational communication as the process whereby an organizational stakeholder (or group of stakeholders) attempts to stimulate meaning in the mind of another organizational stakeholder (or group of stakeholders) through the intentional use of verbal, nonverbal, and/or mediated messages. You’ll notice the similarities between this definition and the one we provided earlier for human communication. Let’s break this definition down by exploring the primary unique factor in this definition, organizational stakeholders.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary of Business Terms, a stakeholder is “any party that has an interest in an organization. Stakeholders of a company include stockholders, bondholders, customers, suppliers, employees, and so forth” (Scott, 2009, p. 503). An organization has a range of different stakeholders. Here is a short list of some of the stakeholders within an organization: workers, managers, shareholders, and others. Every organization must also be concerned with stakeholders within its external environment, including competitors, community members, and governmental agencies. Every organization has a wide range of stakeholders that it must attend to to run itself smoothly.

A Brief History of Organizational Communication

In 1913, Frederick Taylor published “Principles of Scientific Management,“ ushering in a new understanding of modern organizations. Frederick Taylor was trained as an engineer and played a prominent role in scientific management. This approach believes that organizations should be run like machines. Workers must do labor, and managers must think. There is limited communication. This perspective is management-oriented and production-centered in its approach to organizational communication. Taylor believed that the reason why most organizations failed was that they lacked successful systematic management. He wrote that “the best management is true science resting upon clearly defined laws, rules, and principles, as a foundation” (Taylor, 1913, p. 19). He further noted that “under scientific management, arbitrary power, arbitrary dictation ceases, and every single subject, large and small, becomes a question for scientific investigation, for reduction to law” (p. 211). Taylor believed that any job could be performed more effectively if it were done scientifically. Taylor conducted time and motion studies, which resulted in increased organizational efficiency. Max Weber and Henri Fayol were two theorists renowned for their contributions to the classical organizational communication perspectives. These two theories focus on the structure of the organization rather than its activities. Many of their ideas are still relevant today.

Max Weber termed bureaucracy the ideal that organizations should aim for and aspire to. Weber was influenced by socialist philosophy. He developed the concept of bureaucracy after observing several instances of corruption and unethical behavior among leaders. He felt that organizational leadership should center on task proficiency and impersonal relationships. Although many people associate bureaucracy with red tape and ineffective organizations, this is not necessarily the outcome of bureaucracy. According to Weber, bureaucracy should be synonymous with order, consistency, reason, and reliability. Organizations must have specific rules and emphasize impersonality to aspire to these traits. He noted that bureaucratic organizations must have the following characteristics:

Specialization & Division of Labor: A Specific set of tasks allows employees to achieve their objectives. Thus, every worker did not have to perform multiple tasks, but rather an exclusive task assigned to that worker. This helped alleviate multiple trainings and increase production.
Rules & Procedures: Written policies help manage and direct the organization. Managers spend most of their time ensuring these policies guide and function effectively within the organization. These procedures serve as a guide and resource for the organization.
Hierarchy of Authority: Organizations require a chain of command structured in a pyramid-like format. There are levels of supervisors and subordinates. Each worker answers to their corresponding superior. This would facilitate a direct line of communication and enhance efficiency within the organization.
Formal Communication: All decisions, rules, regulations, and behaviors are recorded. This information and communication regarding the chain of command will be shared. Hence, everything is documented and accounted for. What needs to be done is clear because it is written down.
Detailed Job Descriptions: The organization has clear and concise definitions, directions, and responsibilities for each position. Each worker is aware of their task and how to perform it.
Employment Based on Expertise: The organization will assign workers to positions that fit their competencies, placing them where they can maximize production.

Henri Fayol managed a French mining company, Comambault, which he transformed from almost bankrupt to a very successful one. Initially, he worked there as an engineer, then moved into management, and later leadership. Like Weber, Fayol believed that there needed to be a division of labor, a hierarchy, and fair practices. Fayol believed that there were principles of management which included:

Unity of Direction: The organization should have the same objectives, one plan/goal, and one person of leadership/authority.
Unity of Command: Employees should get orders from only one person. Therefore, there would not be a chain of command. One person would be the person in charge and responsible.
Authority: Managers have the entitlement to provide orders and obtain compliance. No other individuals in the organization hold the same level of power.
Order: The organization must have designated places for workers and resources, and be in the right place at the right time.
Subordination of Individual Interest to the General Interests: The organization’s interests are most significant, not those of the group or individuals working for the organization.
Scalar Chain: There is a hierarchical order of authority. Communication is transferred from one person to another in sequence and succession. This is similar to horizontal communication, where workers of the same level communicate.

Even though Fayol’s principles may appear strict, he was one of the first theorists to grasp that unconditional compliance with an organization may lead to problems. Hence, he also noted that each organization must determine the most favorable levels of authority. In the classical perspective, communication has two functions: control and command. Fayol believes that organizations must limit communication to precise and explicit language for effective task design and implementation. Thus, communication is not spontaneous and is more centralized in a classical organization.

Elton Mayo was a Harvard Professor interested in Frederick Taylor’s work. He was interested in learning about ways to increase productivity. In 1924, Elton Mayo and his protégé, Fritz Roethlisberger, were awarded a grant by the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy of Science to study productivity and lighting at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company. The Hawthorne experiments, as Elton Mayo’s body of work became known, are a series of experiments in human relations conducted between 1924 and 1932 at Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois.

Illumination Study

The first study at Hawthorne Works was designed to test various lighting levels explicitly and how the lighting levels affected worker productivity. The original hypothesis of the illumination study was that worker productivity would increase as lighting increased. The opposite was also predicted; worker productivity would decrease as lighting decreased. The original impetus behind the study was the electric power industry, which believed that if it could demonstrate the importance of artificial lighting, organizations around the country would adopt artificial lighting instead of natural lighting to enhance worker productivity.

The research began in the fall of 1924. It continued through the spring of 1927 as three groups of workers were put through the experiment: relay assembly workers, coil winding workers, and inspectors. After three different testing conditions were concluded, the researchers were perplexed by their findings. It did not matter if the researchers increased or decreased light in the company; the workers’ productivity increased. This finding was even factual when the researchers turned down the lights so the workers could barely see. The researchers later realized that lighting did not affect worker productivity; instead, the researchers’ presence had an impact. That’s why production outcomes were similar to those of the lighting study: workers were influenced by the attention they got from the researchers. This incident was labeled the “Hawthorne Effect”. Once workers felt like they were being noticed or recognized, it influenced their productivity. Group norms were also affected.

Mayo continued studying organizational communication through a relay assembly study that introduced various changes to the workers’ environment, including pay rates, bonuses, lighting, shortened workdays/weeks, and rest periods. Surprisingly, as the test period quickly spanned from an original testing period of a couple of months to more than two years, productivity increased regardless of the experimenters’ actions. Productivity increased by over 30 percent during the first two and a half years of the study and then remained stable for the remainder of the tests. The physicals the workers received every six weeks also showed that the women had improved physical health, and their absenteeism decreased during the study period. Even more important, the women regularly expressed increased job satisfaction.

Employee Interview Study

During the middle of the relay assembly studies, a group of Harvard researchers led by Elton Mayo and F. J. Roethlisberger joined the team of engineers at Hawthorne Works to add further expertise and explanation to the studies underhand. One of Mayo’s most significant contributions was conducting interviews with workers at Hawthorne Works as part of the follow-up to the illumination and relay studies.

From 1928 to 1931, Harvard researchers interviewed over 21,000 workers to gauge worker morale and determine the job factors that impacted both morale and job satisfaction. Based on the illumination and relay studies, the researchers predicted that increasing worker morale and satisfaction would lead to greater efficiency and productivity among workers. The interview study posed some new challenges for the researchers. Mayo (1945) notes that the “experience itself was unusual; there are few people in this world who have had the experience of finding someone intelligent, attentive, and eager to listen without interruption to all that he or she has to say” (p. 163). To this end, Mayo trained a series of interviewers to listen and not give advice as they took descriptive notes of what the workers told them.

After the interviewing study was completed, the researchers attempted to make sense of the mounds of data they had accumulated. One interesting side effect was noted. After being interviewed by a researcher about the employee’s working conditions, the employee reported increased satisfaction. Ultimately, the very act of being asked about their working conditions made the employees more satisfied workers and more productive. One of the interesting outcomes of this study is the practice of employee reaction surveys, which are still widely used in organizations today.

The Hawthorne Studies and the research of Mayo and Roethlisberger reinvented how organizations think about and manage workers. Unlike Taylor’s perspective, Mayo and Roethlisberger felt that interpersonal relationships were meaningful. Moreover, they felt that society was composed of groups, not just individuals. Individuals do not act independently with their interests but are influenced by others, and most workers’ decisions are more emotional than rational. One cannot overstress the importance of Mayo and Roethlisberger on management theory and organizational academics. Overall, these studies demonstrate the importance of communication in subordinate-supervisor interactions, the significance of peer relationships, and the value of informal organizations.

While the Hawthorne Studies revolutionized management theory, they also had several problematic aspects. For example, most of the significant studies in this series consisted of small samples of workers (6 in the relay study; 13 in the bank wiring study), so these results are suspect from a scientific perspective. Furthermore, some would argue that the Hawthorne effects resulted from workers being more concerned about unemployment than about communication relationships. Despite potential study errors, Mayo, Roethlisberger, and Dickson’s conclusion was extraordinary. Relationships have a significant impact on the quality of organizational performance.

Kurt Lewin

Kurt Lewin was another person who explored the human relations side of organizational communication. Lewin was a refugee from Nazi Germany. He adored democracy and was passionate about applying psychology to improve the world. During World War II, Lewin was at the University of Iowa. The U.S. government asked him to research ways to advise housewives against purchasing meat, as there was a severe shortage. Lewin felt a huge barrier because housewives were expected to buy meat for their families, friends, and parents, who anticipated being served meat. Lewin hypothesized that if housewives could discuss their meat-buying habits with other housewives, they could overcome this barrier. Lewin and his cohorts performed the experiments and found support for his hypothesis. Housewives who could talk about their meat purchasing with other housewives were ten times more likely to change their behavior.

Lewin felt like he could analyze these same principles in an organization. Lester Coch and John R.P. French found that workers in a pajama factory were more likely to espouse new work methods if they were allowed to discuss them and exercise some influence on the decisions that affected their jobs. These latest findings helped organizations realize the benefits of group formation, development, and attitudes. Lewin’s ideas helped influence future organizational communication theorists by emphasizing the importance of communication. Lewin helped identify that workers want a voice and to provide input on their tasks.

Key Takeaways

Stanley Deetz articulated three different ways the term “organizational communication” can be understood: as a discipline, as a way to describe/explain organizations, and as a phenomenon within organizations.
- His first perspective describes organizational communication as an academic discipline that encompasses an intellectual history, textbooks, courses, and degrees, among other elements.
- The second way to describe organizational communication is as a way of describing organizations. Under this perspective, organizational communication is used to describe and/or explain how organizations function.
- Lastly, organizational communication is a specific behavior set within an organization. People talk and interact with one another, which is a form of organizational communication. Through these interactions, we create the phenomenon that is an organization.
In this book, the authors define “organizational communication” as the process whereby an organizational stakeholder (or group of stakeholders) attempts to stimulate meaning in the minds of other organizational stakeholders (or groups of stakeholders) through the intentional use of verbal, nonverbal, and/or mediated messages.
Elton Mayo and his research associates studied how lighting affects production. They later realized that the workers were not affected by the lighting, but rather by the researcher’s presence.
Kurt Lewin believed that group dynamics significantly impacted behavioral outcomes. When workers discuss their tasks with others, it affects the organization.
Workers typically established an informal standard for output that was never explicitly stated but was nonetheless predetermined by the group.

References

Deetz, S. (2001). Conceptual Foundations. In F. M. Jablin & L. L. Putnam (Eds.), The new handbook of organizational communication: Advances in theory, research, and methods (pp. 3–46). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Mumby, D., & Stohl, C. (1996). Disciplining organizational communication studies. Management Communication Quarterly, 10, 50–72.

Scott, D. L. (Ed.). (2009). stakeholder. In The American heritage dictionary of business terms (p. 503). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Taylor, F. (1913). Principles of scientific management. New York, NY: Harper.

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PPSC COM 2250 Introduction to Organizational Communication Copyright © 2021 by Rebekah Bennetch; Corey Owen; Zachary Keesey; Katie Wheeler; and Lina Rawlings is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.