2.3.7.5 Chronological Progression
of Perspectives for Understanding Organizational Communication
Now that you have a better understanding of the concept of
organizational communication, let's look at five different perspectives for
understanding organizational communication that have developed over time.
Classical Management Perspective
The original perspective for understanding organizational
communication can be described using a machine metaphor. At the beginning of
the industrial age, where people thought science could solve almost every
problem, American Frederick Taylor, Frenchman Henri Fayol, and German Max Weber
tried to apply scientific solutions to organizations. They wanted to determine
how organizations and workers could function in an ideal scientific manner.
Organizations during the industrial revolution wanted to know how they could
maximize their profits so the classical management perspective focused on
worker productivity.
During this time, Weber was also developing his ideas about
bureaucracy. He was fascinated on what the ideal organization
should look like, and believed that effective hierarchies helped organizations
operate effectively. Precise rules, a division of labor,
centralized authority, and a distinctly defined hierarchy should be driven by
rational thought void of emotion and outside influence (Weber,
1947).
Human Relations Perspective
Because of the overly mechanical nature of the classical
management perspective, organizational scholars wanted to focus on the human
elements that make up organizations. The human relations perspective emerged
out of the deficiencies of classical management where managers neglected
employees' needs and treated them as pieces of a machine rather than unique
individuals. The human relations approach focuses on how
organizational members relate to one another, and how individuals'
needs influence their performance in organizations. In 1924 Elton
Mayo and his team of Harvard scientists began a series of studies that were
initially interested in how to modify working conditions to increase worker
productivity, decrease employee turnover, and change the overall poor
organizational effectiveness at the Hawthorne Electric Plant near Chicago
(Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939).
Human Resources Perspective
The Human Resources perspective picks up where human relations
left off. The primary criticism of the previous approach was that it was still
primarily concerned with productivity, and tried to achieve worker productivity
simply by making workers happy. The idea that a happy employee would be a
productive employee makes initial sense. However, happiness does not mean that
we will be productive workers. As a matter of fact, an individual can be happy
with a job and not work very hard.
Human Resources attempts to truly embrace
participation by all organizational members, viewing each person as a valuable
human resource. Employees are valuable resources that should be
fully involved to manifest their abilities and productivity.
Using this approach, organizations began to encourage employee participation in
decision making.
Systems Perspective
Collectively, individuals in organizations achieve more than
they can independently (Barnard, 1838; Katz & Kahn, 1966; Redding, 1972;
von Bertalanffy, 1968). The systems perspective for
understanding organizations is «concerned with problems of
relationships, of structure, and of interdependence rather than with the
constant attributes of objects» (Katz & Kahn, 1966,
p.18). An organization is like a living organism, and must exist in its
external environment in order to survive. Organizations are not isolated, and
must interact with other organizations within their environments to survive.
Without this interaction an organization remains what we call closed, and
withers away (Buckley, 1967).
All organizations have basic properties.
Equifinality means that a system (organization)
can reach its goals from different paths. For example, each
professor that teaches public speaking does so in a different way but, the end
result is that the students in each of the classes as completed a course in
public speaking. Negative entropy is the ability
of an organization to overcome the possibility of becoming run
down. Any steps your campus takes to keep its curriculum up to
date, and its facilities maintained is considered negative entropy.
Requisite variety means that organizations must be
responsive to their external environment and adjust when needed.
On the campus of your authors, there were not enough students attending. So,
the campus did a marketing study to figure out how to reach potential students.
Homeostasis points to an organization's need for
stability in a turbulent environment. As gas prices have gone up,
organizations impacted by these rising costs take steps to ensure their
survival and profitability. Complexity states that
the more an organization grows and interacts, the more elaborate it
becomes (Katz & Kahn, 1966; von Bertalanffy, 1968; Miller,
2002). Think about huge companies like AT&T. It must have elaborate
organizational systems in place to deal with all of its employees and customers
in a competitive market place.
Cultural Perspective
Each organization has unique characteristics that make it
different from other organizations. Every organization has certain cultural
differences such as language, traditions, symbols, practices, past-times, and
social conveniences that distinguish it from other organizations. Each
organization is rich with its own histories, stories, customs, and social
norms. We can understand organizations by seeing them as unique cultures.
Simply put, the cultural perspective states
that organizations maintain: 1) Shared values and beliefs, 2)
Common practices, skills, and actions, 3) Customarily observed rules, 4)
Objects and artifacts, and 5) Mutually understood meanings.
Shockley-Zalabak (2002) contends, «Organizational culture reflects the
shared realities and shared practices in the organization and how these
realities create and shape organizational events» (p. 63). Not every
individual in an organization shares, supports, or engages in organizational
values, beliefs, or rules in a similar manner. Instead, organizational culture
includes various perspectives in a continually changing, emerging, and complex
environment
| 
