Communication and Competencies for Managing Change - Essay Example

Professional Organization Communication Vision ment In our everyday life, we encounter various kinds of organizations – football clubs, businesses, hospitals or musical groups among others. They vary in their levels of formality, goals and sizes. However, common to all of them, leadership and purpose stand out. Therefore, an organization could be defined as a group of people who work together towards the achievement of a specific goal or purpose. For example, the plastic molding and manufacturing firm that I worked in had many employees all working to ensuring that we manufacture as much plastic products as possible to meet market demand and make profits for shareholders. Belasen (2000) observes that whereas organizations should have a form of leadership to steer them towards achievement of their goals, this leadership could not necessarily be that obvious in some organizations. With an organization focused on attaining a specific goal, coordination plays a critical role. As such, communication forms the basis of the successful existence of an organization. Therefore, more and more organizations appreciate the importance of communication, especially where production process depend largely on teamwork and collaboration among workers from different functional groups (Belasen, 2000; King, 2009). The change in communication technologies has resulted in transformation of both organizational and work structures, making communication technologies and practices important in organizations. Figure 1 graphically portrays our organizational communication concept. Message would originate from the sender and channeled through the appropriate channel to the recipient, with various factors interfering with the communication, referred to as noise in the graphical representation. Figure 1: Graphical representation of organizational communication (Source: Author) Communication is a complex and multifaceted concept in any organization. From the graphical representation of our organization’s communication concept, it would be appreciated that other than the sender and receiver of the message, the environment, the source of noise, also plays a role together with the channels. This appreciates the role of social context and structure of an organization with regards to how it influences communication. According to Downs and Adrian (2004), communication should be considered as a continuous and dynamic process. Furthermore, having analyzed various literature sources, these scholars appreciate communication as a process. This idea of process indicates the interaction of various components whose outcomes would be determined by unspecific consequences. Moreover, Hatala and Lutta (2009) observe that communication in organizations could also include non-informational and non-message matters that would be processed to give valid organizational meaning. Therefore, organizational communication would be defined as the processing of information through, into and out of organizations so as to yield organizationally valid meanings. Even as communication informs the attainment of competitive advantage in an organization, knowledge serves as a significant asset in making use of the communication. Knowledge organization presents a model of ways through which organizations utilize information to foster growth and adapt to external changes (Hislop, 2013). Information would be used by organizations to make sense of their environment, to come up with new knowledge and to evaluate information necessary for decision-making. Categorized as information interpretation, conversion and processing respectively by (Belasen, 2000), this results in new products and capabilities for organizations. This knowledge is considered to be continually reconfiguring and indeterminate. Its utilization cannot be managed centrally. It can only meet the intended goal through coordination and integration of various specialists. Combining the existing knowledge with incremental learning leads to innovations and makes knowledge more available to an organization. This coordination and integration of continuously acquired knowledge by various agents so as to make the information availed meaningful to an organization is known as knowledge management. Communication technologies and practices are most important in knowledge organizations. These systems aid the people in an organization in seeking and using information. Hatala and Lutta (2009) perceive system orientation as a content-based reality found in an external, objective entity which should be dependent on the social systems and users. In this context, systems would encompass communities, social structures and practices meant for the sharing and dissemination of information. Thus, information systems refer to the tools and agents that facilitate information acquisition. As noted by King (2009), new communication technologies play a critical role in enabling every aspect of organizational effectiveness and management, including innovation, organizational alliances, participative management, change management and knowledge management. The computer facilitated group communication capabilities assist traditional organizational groups in coordinating and thus working more effectively. Thus, capitalizing in information systems would enable organizations realize competitive advantage in its market. The importance of knowledge would only be realized through learning. The heterogeneity of learning poses a challenge in defining it. However, its characteristics facilitate an understanding of what this means. For that matter, learning could occur through varied processes and mechanisms through formal education, workplace interventions or day-to-day reflections. It could occur at individual, group or organizational level (Hislop, 2013). Therefore, organizations learn through embedding group and individual learning in the processes, structures, routines, rules and databases of an organization. This is referred to as organizational learning. Nonetheless, this individual or group level learning should be able to impact the structures and processes at the organizational level for organization learning to occur. Even so, for this organizational learning to occur, the leader in the organization should energize the team members. Belasen (2000) observes that this would be best accomplished through oral communication and would result in increased production and accomplishment of the set goals. Therefore, this would result in a high-performance team where sociotechnical system has been optimized. These factors interrelate to create a sociotechnical knowing organization. Knowledge management is the basis for any successful organization as this involves the retrieval of information. For this information to be useful, it then has to be communicated to individuals and groups in an organization. Organizational communication entails the effective communication of such information to ensure that it reaches the individuals and workgroups within an organization in an appropriate manner. Making sure that the information is relayed appropriately ensures that such information becomes valuable to the recipients and thus causes learning. Modern-day organizations leverage on information systems to achieve this objective. Information systems enable organizations to communicate effectively to individuals, and more so to groups. It is through the learning of these individuals and groups within an organization that the organization itself would learn. Hence, it would be appropriate to view organizational learning as the interaction of individuals and groups learning in a way that would result in the organizational level learning. Eventually, the teams in such organizations become highly productive and meet the set goals. Such teams are referred to as high-performance teams. Information sharing is a key component of an organization that seeks to attain and sustain competitive advantage. This indicates the importance of allowing free flow of information among members of an organization. It is for this reason that Hislop (2013) defines knowledge in an organization as the intersection of information, theory and experience. The information sharing needs of an organization would be determined by the unique characteristics of the culture of an organization. Even so, increased performance in an organization demands that new information be continually disseminated to key individuals in the organization. Thus, it would be right to consider information as an economic resource. Information sharing would only be fostered by support from the top management, trust among individuals and work groups and a shared vision (Downs & Adrian, 2004). This would promote the sharing of information across organizational and individual boundaries and inculcated into organizational routine practices. Developing effective solutions in an organization entails the integration and application of various bodies of knowledge from workers in an organization. This need for the acquisition and sharing of knowledge calls for interpersonal interactions. Thus, Hislop (2013) indicates the importance of social capital in such a context, relating to the networks of personal relationships and the resources that such people could draw from utilizing such networks. This theory basically predicts that resources would only be available to people through such networks. This social capital could be perceived in three dimensions: cognitive, structural and relational. Knowledge organizations use social capital to access the knowledge required to work effectively. This indicates the importance of willingness of people to share knowledge with a sense of interpersonal trust. Trust forms an important component of ensuring that individuals and work groups work in a coordinated fashion thus resulting in teamwork. Communication skills would therefore be appropriate to ensure that social capital translates to gainful meaning to the organization. That is why the social network theory postulates that the relationships of individuals, work groups and organizations affect behaviors and beliefs. It explains the social structures and interpersonal mechanisms among interacting units. According to Downs and Adrian (2004), the players in a social network could increase organizational performance based on their connections. As such, teamwork fosters social networking which boost organizational performance. Organizations could be perceived as societies of minds where decisions do not result from a consequence of single and orderly activities but ecology of information processes. Thus, an intelligent organization would gather, process, interpret and communicate the appropriate information for decision making process (Downs & Adrian, 2004). Such organizations make use of information systems for the coordination of dispersed activities. Informed by organizational learning, intelligent organizations adapt to changes in the external environment by acquiring knowledge of its internal and also external environment (Belasen, 2000). Internally, employees comprise the most appropriate source of information. Externally, customers and other businesses provide the needed information. Considering information from the global environment would provide a globally-focused organization with the required information to enable it adapt to the global market environment. For instance, in the plastic molding firm that I worked in, information gathered from other molders around the world served as an important determinant of the strategies of the organization in the marketplace. Technological workplace greatly impacts on team management and organizational communication. It faces a myriad of challenges which should be effectively mitigated to cushion organizations against any negative consequences. One of the challenges is lack of trust among the virtual teams. The solution to this problem does not necessarily call for face-to-face communication. According to Hislop (2013), trust could be fostered through consistent and reliable responsiveness when dealing with teammates. Moreover, technological organizations face the challenge of having to balance between interpersonal and technical skills. Belasen (2000) observes that due to the minimal face-to-face interaction in such organizations, managers tend to assume the importance of interpersonal skills and exclusively select team members based on their technical skills. This challenge could be mitigated at the recruitment and selection point. The organization should seek to recruit employees who exhibit a proper balance of these two aspects. Despite their seldom face-to-face interaction, members of a technological organization need to possess interpersonal skills to foster communication. Finally, the challenge of assessing performance could be solved through the adoption of effective performance measurement tools. Hislop (2013) gives balanced scorecards as effective tools that measure both the financial and non-financial function of performance. They determine performance based on growth, profitability, process improvement and customer satisfaction. This vision provides a blueprint that could effectively guide mangers in building effective workplace teams. Of importance would be to appreciate that individuals need to have the competence required to excel as individuals, in their work groups and at the organizational level. Unless the effect of the individual and work group level performance impacts on the organizational level, then, cohesion would be wanting. For this to occur, managers need to promote communication among team members. Effective organizational communication ensures that appropriate information is relayed to the relevant recipients for which action should be taken. Managers should leverage on technology to set up effective information systems that would efficiently ensure that information is relayed. Additionally, managers should use the organizational social capital to ensure that members beneficially interact and as such share information. This information forms a critical component of organization knowledge as through this, organizational learning occurs and thus resulting in high-performance teams. Even so, managers should adopt measures that would ensure that they survive the turbulent market environment and attain sustainable advantage through mitigating the challenges associated with technological organizations including lack of trust, ignorance of interpersonal skills and inability to effectively assess performance. References Belasen, A. T. (2000). Leading the learning organization: Communication and competences for managing change. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Downs, C. W. & Adrian, A. D. (2004). Assessing organizational communication: Strategic communication audits. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Hatala, J. & Lutta, J. G. (2009). Managing information sharing within an organizational setting: A social network perspective. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 21 (4), 5 – 33. Hislop, D. (2013). Knowledge management in organizations: A critical introduction (3rd ed.). Oxford, OX: Oxford University Press. King, W. R. (2009). Knowledge, management and organizational learning. Annals of Information Systems, 4 (1), 3 – 12. Read More