THE CHARACTER OF ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION: A REVIEW AND NEW CONCEPTUALIZATION

Abstract

Although a large contingency of theory and research has been conducted in the area of individual and interpersonal communication, relatively few theoreticians have focused on the broader character of communication at the organizational level of analysis. With the increasing emphases on total quality, leadership, adaptive cultures, process reengineering, and other organizational change and development efforts, however, the need to understand the process and function of organizational communication at a broader, more systemic level is paramount. The following paper attempts to address this issue by providing: (1) a comparative review and critique of three “classic” theoretical approaches to describing the importance of communication in organizations and the relationship between communication and organizational functioning (open systems theory, the information‐processing perspective, and the communication as culture framework); and (2) a new integrative framework—the CPR model of organizational communication—for conceptualizing and understanding the nature of communication in organizations based on constructs adapted from these three perspectives. The model is then used both in an applied example to help diagnose an organizational system and to stimulate suggestions for future research.

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