5.1.3 Organizational communications

Although communications in organizations often have the character of interpersonal, but not always the problems of their organization are confined to interpersonal barriers. Often, in the way of effective communications and, accordingly, the success of an organization, specific barriers arise related to various problems of organizations as integrity systems. These organizational barriers to communication ^* deserve special attention, since their nature is not connected with the specifics of individual or group behavior of people, but with non-communication problems of organizations, i.e. it is about the distortion of messages, information overloads and unsatisfactory organization structure.

Message corruption When information moves up and down within the organization, the meaning of the messages may be distorted. Such a distortion may be due to several reasons. Messages can be distorted unintentionally due to difficulties in interpersonal contact, as discussed above. However, other factors play a significant role in the appearance of distortions.

First of all, a conscious distortion of information by the source is possible. Such a distortion may occur, for example, when a message serves to assess the activity of a source and modifies it so that a change in meaning occurs in its interests.

Secondly, another important problem of exchange is associated with the so-called information filtering. Filtering is the process of losing a part of the message meaning due to unavoidable losses of any nature when moving up or down through management levels or within one level of organization of one employee to another.

Filtering is carried out when messages are aggregated, moving up the levels of the management hierarchy, selectively selecting information when it is distributed among different recipients, when the head cut off general information and simplifying messages if specific instructions are sent to subordinates, etc.

Managers who transmit messages and determine what to transmit, proceed from the desire to overcome all sorts of obstacles in interpersonal contacts, from their own assessment of the importance and usefulness for the work of a particular information. This may encourage them to weed out some and accentuate other messages. Such a selection may result in missing important information in another sector of the organization or the receipt of information there by a significant distortion of the content. For example, in one study, it was reported that "only 63% of the information sent by the board of directors reached the vice-presidents, 40% - to the heads of workshops and 20% - to the workers."

Other reasons for filtering information are possible. For example, messages sent up the steps of the management hierarchy may be distorted due to the observed tendency to supply the bosses with as little as possible positively perceived information. This can lead to the fact that the subordinate does not inform the manager about a potential or existing problem, since "he does not want to give the head bad news". Since subordinates often want approval from the supervisor, they can only tell him what he wants to hear. Studies show that such status differences strongly affect the quality of information exchange. Among other reasons that prevent employees from transmitting reliable information to the top may be the fear of punishment and a sense of the futility of their business.

Information overload. Another important reason for which the content of the message may not reach the recipient, overloading the recipient with other incoming messages or its not configured to the subject of the message. In this case, the transmitted idea will not reach the recipient either.

Poor organization structure. In organizations with a complex multi-level structure, problems of a different kind are possible. As we discussed above, the units within the organization are themselves organizations and, therefore, they inevitably have their own goals. Therefore, if the structure of the organization and the motivation system are built up badly, the own goals of the divisions may conflict with the overall goals of the organization and, in particular, block the communication channels. The more levels in the structure of the organization, the greater the likelihood of significant contradictions in it.

To overcome these obstacles in both oral and written communications adopted the system "Five" C "communication":

1. Clarity. Communication, information should be as unambiguous as possible. Often, lack of clarity is caused by an attempt to express too many thoughts with one sentence.

2. Completeness (Completeness). Simplification of information may lead to its incompleteness. Some of the information may be more harmful than its complete absence.

3. Brevity (Сonciseness). When Neil McElrou was President of Procter and Gamble (Progr and Gmblem), he refused to read any report if it took up more than one page. One specialist has developed a win-win method of turning ignorance into apparent communication success. The Brauton system uses a lexicon of thirty carefully selected "noise words" (see Table 4.1). The combinations of such noise words are impressive. However, most communications improve when a few well-chosen words replace a verbose message with carelessly chosen words. In the case of incoherent long messages, the problem is rarely associated with the immensity of the topic. More often the case is in the inability of the communicator to compose a specific message that he wants to convey.

4. Concreteness (Concreteness). Typically, communicators resort to abstractions and generalizations when they are not quite sure about real, concrete facts. Abstraction, of course, is valuable when we are dealing with abstract concepts. However, we waste precious time and ability when we squeeze real things into abstract or idiomatic terminology to make an impression.
   The choice of specific terminology is becoming increasingly important as the interaction of nations grows. A term acceptable in one culture may have a completely unacceptable meaning in another.

5. Correctness (Correctness). The flawless use of communication methods is completely useless if the message is incorrect.