Yesterday I started my third eight-week course in my Master’s in Communication and Leadership from Gonzaga University. So I don’t have much time to read or write anything outside of the class. So, like I did the past two classes, I’m going to pour various thoughts and comments that spun off class materials into my blog posts.
The main textbook for the course is Strategic Organizational Communication: In a Global Economy by Charles Conrad and Marshall Scott Poole. This week we need to read Unit I, first three chapters, and I managed to complete one chapter and part of the second last night.
Unit One is titled: Underlying Concepts. So what are the underlying concepts of Organizational Communication.
In chapter one the authors look at the old, discarded image. Organizations as “things” or “containers” through with people send chunks of information to each other through arranged “channels” or “conduits.” This is the sort of structure people have in mind when they try to solve the complaint of about lack of communication with the conveying of additional information to the employees. And yet they still get the same feedback, when they do a focus group or poll, about lack of communication. How much more information can we deliver?
Why doesn’t this metaphor work? The authors propose three main weaknesses:
- Oversimplifies communication as mere information exchange
- Assumes a greater stability to organizations than they have
- Sees employees as robots that react in a defined way to the messages received
In contrast, the new model sees organizations and dynamic, continually changing groups of people trying to make sense of what is happening around them while pursuing both individual and group goals. Rather than viewing communication as information exchange, it sees it as many-faceted process by which organizing takes place.
Another underlying concept in the “fundamental paradox” of organizations. Again, old school visualizes organizations as places where people work together, cooperate efficiently, and where conflicts and tensions are signs of failure. Not so, says the new perspective. Organizations are places that manage multiple tensions, tensions which are an integral part of the organizations working. Managing those tensions, not eliminating them, is how an organization succeeds. The fundamental tension is that between the individual needs and organizational needs. People need autonomy, creativity and sociability, as well as stability and predictability. Organizations need control and coordination. It is organizing the balance between these events, these tensions, that shows the success of an organization.
When reading that last part about tensions it makes me think about events in my life where people have attempted to prevent conflict, ignore conflict, sidestep conflict, suppress conflict. Personally I know I am one who likes to avoid conflict. It has taken me years to get comfortable with the idea (not the fact) of embracing conflict, not for conflicts sake, but for the process and change it can bring about. Organizing tensions seems a logical conclusion to me. Avoiding conflict from either side, robs one or both sides of the power of change, the power to resolve. Using that tension creates a dynamic atmosphere that leads to progress, properly organized.
Embrace the tension.
At The Rainbow 