Organizational Communication

The Information and Communication Revolution that we are amidst, has just moved on to the next level. The role of the electronic and wireless media has increased manifold and the demand for excellence in communication is all around. It hardly matters if the application of organizational communication is to achieve individual or collective, management goals; the level of efficiency affects every transaction. The importance of communication is better understood with the need to interact. Whether on a personal level, or within an organization, people relate to one another only through some medium of communication. In fact, it would not be prudish to state that an organization’s survival largely depends on teams that are able to maintain effective and lasting relationships.

The extent and efficiency of communication in organizations are influenced by the infrastructure of the organization itself. The meaningful and essential transfer of information between persons and groups within an organization ripples down into the quality and profitability of every transaction. The need to communicate may be extensive, from the completion of a task or management aim, to establishing and maintaining profitable human relationship. The ‘transfer’ of ideas and crucial information from the sender to the receiver is what organizational communication is all about. The efficiency lies in the information being received in an ‘as-is’ manner. The vital concepts and strategies within an organization need to be effectively communicated for a profitable outcome.

Organizational communication is a functional component of any organizational system. The referrence may or may not be confined to some interpersonal context. Communication in organizations is designed and monitored within a structure that is pre-determined by the management, to serve the profit enhancing capacity of the set up. The communication is kept flowing within a network of channels, between members and units. It is natural for a communication system or pattern to continue in a way that it accesses all the information vital to decision making. However, in the face of breakdown in the communication process, an organization needs to maintain an empirically verifiable data base.

The organizational communication strategy is based on a number of observable behaviors that can be replicated and transformed into variables and can be converted into mediums that extend to various groups and settings. It is a mechanical process of constructing and encoding information and then transmitting the same through some channel, with the chances of distortion identified and eliminated. Individual differences within an organization can be minimized with careful management techniques and communicative activity. The organizational communication can either move along a prescribed pathway or a random application. The former is the most applied and the best technique for formal communication.

The dedicated organizational communication software available is applicable to verbal, nonverbal and written communication. The information moves along designated routes and all communication is recorded and filed as work orders, accounting records, inventory, sales reports and policy statements. The target is to inform or to request information, within the paradigms set for the line of authority. The communication in organizations define the important channels and map the flow of infromation. The communication is carried out within structured guidelines for sending and receiving and recording messages that are vital to operations and business. Dedicated information, opinion and expression are chosen for convenience and necessity.

Organizational communication is designed to cater to the replication of psychological, social and economic and technological communication needs of the company. The exchange of information is carried out and charted to conform and share opimion and feed back from superiors and ambitions, in the pursuit of achievement and power. The need to ‘locomote’ and ‘blow off steam’, as well as bypass official channels at times, contributes to the factors essential for the application of a communication strategy within every organization.

Communication in organizations works like a circuit and ensures the effective application of the dynamics of communication. One-way communication may be faster, but two-way communication is more accurate and most organizations opt for the latter.