Communication and Organizational Culture

Abstract

When people in an organization understand themselves and their context of interaction from very different perspectives, there is an increased risk of poor organizational dialogue. The reason is not only that individuals’ social interpretations of others are influenced by their idiosyncratic perspectives. In interactions involving a significant diversity of individual perspectives, there is also a risk that communicators form radically different interpretations of goals and processes in the organization. It is therefore of crucial importance that people have a sufficiently similar understanding of action-guiding information, communicative acts and the workplace itself. The chapter focuses on the importance of creating shared organizational culture on the basis of four communication conditions from social interaction theory. (1) In communicative processes, senders need to secure the attention of audiences. (2) Senders and audiences need to have a sufficiently similar understanding of the language that is used. (3) Senders and audiences need to interpret communicative acts in a sufficiently similar way. (4) The attitudes and values that audiences ascribe to senders must correspond to the values and attitudes that senders actually have. After having clarified these conditions, the chapter applies them to analyse fundamental organizational challenges. The final part of the chapter argues that the conditions can, typically on management levels, constitute conceptual tools for creating unifying communicative cultures. Furthermore, using the conditions (1)–(4) actively as a means for securing communication across a diversity of individual perspectives can contribute to reaching organizational goals, no matter how they are defined.