The impact of Communicational climate on job satisfaction and job performance - Literature review Example

THE IMPACT OF COMMUNICATIONAL CLIMATE ON JOB SATISFACTION AND JOB PERFORMANCE of due: Organizational communication has been defined by Conrad & Poole (2011 p.5) as a process whereby an organizational stakeholder (or group stakeholder) attempts to inspire meaning in the mind of another organizational stakeholder (or group stakeholder) through deliberate use of verbal, nonverbal and/or mediated message. Communication is key for any organization as it promotes clarity of direction for all employees in an organization.

Communication makes all employees feel like they belong since they are included in the decisions of the organization, and so communication does increase job satisfaction (International Association of Business Communicators, 1982:15).Many organizations are run through managerial leadership or rather transactional leadership. Burns (1978) says that transactional leadership is based on the assumption that improving communication will increase morale and motivation, which in turn will increase individual and organizational performance (p. 55). It makes a lot of senses that satisfied workers will work harder and perform better than dissatisfied workers; if people are happy at work, they should work harder and perform better than dissatisfied workers; if people are happy at work, they should be more committed to their organization and thus should want to work harder to make sure their organization succeeds.

Northhouse (2010) argues that relational strategies do have positive effects on performance in the production-oriented firms, but not for the reasons typically ascribed to it (p. 45). Rafaeli & Sudweeks (1994) says that 50 years of research on the bond between job satisfaction and performance have not found strong relationships between the two (p. 99). The average correlation is 0.14 which means that about 2 percent of differences in employee’s performance can be attributed to differences in their job satisfaction or that other factors simultaneously increase both satisfaction and performance.

Organizational communication usually takes the form of top-bottom communication meaning that communication comes from top managers to lower rank employees. This is the most common although bottom-top communication also occurs at times. Pliskin & Romm (1990) says that a string of later studies exposed empirical evidence suggesting that employee’s perceptions of top management communication influence employee’s job satisfaction and performance (p. 56-60). Poole (1983) found in a study of hospital nurses, for example, that the factors most influencing nurses’ job satisfaction, and performance were employee’s impressions of their immediate supervisors’ communication followed closely by top management communication (p. 79-82).Dimensions of communication in an organization include; upward communication used mostly by senior managers, horizontal communication by middle-level managers e.g. HR managers, finance managers etc.

and downward communication used by supervisors Reid & Hamersley (2000 p. 103). This is the typical communication dimension in most organizations. According to Wallace (2004) downward communication is the most used communication dimension in most organizations (p. 76). This involves communication coming from senior managers in the organization and being passed down to the lower level managers and employees. This dimension used tools like face to face interaction, meetings, notice boards, and emails among others.

Upward communication involves the communication of subordinates being passed on to senior level managers. This communication dimension used tools like suggestion boxes, face to face interaction, emails among others. Horizontal dimension of communication involves passing information among workers of the same position. This is also very common in most organization as information is frequently passed to employees of the same department, and they use tools like the telephone, intercom and face to face interactions (Eunson, 2007:76).

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