Organisational Culture and Communication

Lecture 1

Three perspectives:
1. Traditional perspective
2. Interpretive perspective
3. Critical Perspective

Traditional perspective
- Communication: a process of creating sharing meaning through the use of signs and
symbols.
- Communication: objectively observable: it ‘is’, it can be measured, identified and
related to other organisational processes

Early traditionalists
Organisations are machines that are operated by managerial control

Communication is effective when the process of sending and receiving messages is accurate
and reliable, the message receiver understands and responds to the message well.

Late traditionalists
Organizations are seen as living organisms with many systems of self-regulation and control. - -
- This perspective emphasizes that besides managers other contextual influences may
control/influence the organization.
- This perspective emphasizes that different elements of the organization do not always
work together in harmony.
- Organizations can adapt or change unlike machines.
- The focus on organizational effectiveness is broadened from morale and productivity to
well-being.

Also known as a realist (one truth)/deterministic/positivist: Everything is always the same

Interpretive perspective
- Communication: a process of creating shared meaning but also constructing social
realities in ways that are coordinated and actively managed.

- Organisations as Cultures: “Culture consists of the abstract values, beliefs and

perceptions that lie behind people’s behaviour”.

- Communication: socially situated meaning-making, generating pockets of coherence

and community through cultural meanings and forms
 - Communication is not directly observable: looking to uncover the culture that lies
behind the actions and conditions in organisations

Organisations are subjective (but not unreal or fiction!)

Culture of an organisation is a network of shared subjective meanings: social construction

through communication
- E.g. of blue being a boy’s color but it used to be pink

Also knowm as relativist (multiple truths)/constructivist/constructionist: anything is never the

same, depends on the situation

The aim of research with an interpretive perspective is to understand how communication is

used in the process of how members of organisations share experiences and socially construct
understanding of these experiences.

Goal: to reveal communicative activities that occur to produce the unique character of the
organisation.

Critical perspective
Takes the idea of social construction one step further: no objective observable truth exists: all
facts are created.

If we socially construct reality, some groups will use organisations for their purpose:
organisations become instruments of privilege and / or oppression
 Give voice to few to express their view. Critically challenging the dominant groups, exposing
power differences and actively intending to change.

Summary:
- Traditional perspective: Reality can be objectively measured
- Interpretive perspective: We socially construct reality but we can aim to understand this
reality by (objectively) observing / describing
- Critical perspective: We socially construct reality and this is to the advantage of some
groups and disadvantage to other groups.We cannot describe / observe / understand
reality objectively. We, therefore, should take a stance: Aim of research: critiquing and
changing society as a whole.
Why do we use this perspectives? Determines:
- What is knowledge and the truth
- What is the aim of the study
- How are we studying the subject
- What are the results

Perspectives should not be mixed, however comparing them will give new insights

Lecture 2

Traditional perspective on communication

- Communication = objective, observable, measurable activity
- Organizations as machines = set of well-engineered parts, controlled by management
and well-maintained communication  efficiency and effectiveness
- Organizations as living organisms = a) complex system of control; b) change and
adaptation to change are relevant

Interpretive perspective on communication

- Communication = a process of creating shared meaning but also constructing social
realities in ways that are coordinated and actively managed
- Organizations as cultures = “Culture consists of the abstract values, believes and
perceptions that lie behind people’s behaviour”

Critical perspective on communication

- Communication = “Reality” is socially constructed no objective, observable truth exists
 all facts are created
- Organizations as instruments of privilege and oppression

Definition of culture
According to the book:
a culture exists when people come together to share a common frame of reference for
interpreting and acting toward one another and the world in which they live
- Including language, values, believes, interpretations of experience

According to Eisenberg and Goodall:

Culture as practices

According to Haviland:
Culture as values (Haviland, 1993): “Culture consists of the abstract values, believes, and
perceptions that lie behind people’s behavior...They are shared by members of a society, and
when acted upon, produce behavior considered to be acceptable within that society”
What is organizational culture?
Organizational culture arises from shared values and ongoing dynamics, dialogues, and
communication among subgroups and individuals in organizations
- Not dictated by managers
- Employees play an active role
A metaphor for organizational culture: The spiderweb: confining, mobilizing, struggle and
conflict, collection of interconnected webs (subcultures)

Traditionalists on organizational culture

Traditionalists are interested in what organizations can do to continue survival and enhance
performance and effectiveness. Looking at structure, size, technology.
- Organizational culture: identity of the organization, presented by management through
cultural artefacts
- Strong culture means: Effective, legitimizes organizational behavior, high loyalty and
commitment

Interpretivists on organizational culture

Reality: Product of interaction processes whereby meanings for experience are negotiated and
then continually sustained through the course of interaction
 observable tangible world of social action is based on organizational member’s sharing of
subjective meanings
- Importance of symbols and themes one can observe/identify when analyzing
communication

Criticalists on organizational culture

Organizational members develop shared and conflicting meanings and they face power
struggles over the conflicting meanings

Members of a dominant group usually experience systematic privilege from these power
struggles, while members of the respective minority groups usually experience systematic
disadvantage
 critical perspective draws attention to particular systematic inequalities between members

 Why we need to consider both the traditional and the critical perspective
Important to be able to spot and distinguish the different perspectives
- Recognize what organizations are doing and what their underlying believes are
- Able to identify the challenges in what organizations are doing and point out the origins
of these challenges
- Develop and implement adequate interventions to support organizations in change and
development towards both more effectiveness and performance to become better
places to work in for all employees
 Traditionalists: developent and change through managerial control over observable
features
Criticalists: development and change through practices and interactions of people at
work

Quantitative vs. qualitative research and the approaches

Quantitative:
- Focused on observable facts
- Mostly done through standardized surveys
- Can show/describe/visualize the situation at hand
 traditional

Can be challenging when wanting to better understand an organizational culture:

o Need to uncover meanings and interpretations of organizational life which are
situated in a particular context/frame of reference
o Want to understand the process by which culture is created, transmitted, and
changed

Qualitative:
Helps to uncover meanings and interpretations through interviews, observations, document
analysis and ethnographies

What us helps to get a grip on organization culture when using methods above:
1. Language and worldview
2. Knowledge structure
3. Consensual and contested meanings
4. Multiple cultural perspective
5. Metaphors
6. Narrativies
7. Rites and ceremonies
8. Reflexive comments
9. Fantasy themes

1. Language and worldview

- Strong determinism: language determines thought
- Weak determinism: language influences or affects thought
E.g., Communication between two employees working together, but who grew up in
different cultural contexts
2. Knowledge structure
- Schema: knowledge structure formed by people through communication, when sharing
experiences in a given group or organizational environment
o Schemata are cognitive structures that are causally connected and can change
through interaction between people
 Homogeneity vs Heterogeneity
 Schemata suggests homogeneity
o Subcultures within a certain organization may create different schemata due to
their different ideas, perspectives and therefore knowledge structures
o As such, frame of reference and situatedness play an important role in the
construction, maintenance and change of knowledge structures

3. Consensual and contested meanings

Question whether organizational culture produces consensual or contested meanings,
example is a ‘borrel’ or company drink

o Counterculture: May directly confront the constitutive and regulative rules of the
dominant culture
 Shows how powerful organizational members may contest dominant
meaning systems, e.g. exclusive paper-parties. Changes to also include
teaching successes

4. Multiple cultural perspective

Multiple cultures may surface due to: new employees, new technologies and mergers
and acquisitions  organizations need to deal with this:
o Some more open to new cultures than others
o New employees: onboarding events/trainings
o New technologies: training all employees
o Mergers and acquisitions: sometimes support in creating one new culture by
trying to take the best of both worlds

5. Metaphors
The basis of an interpretative process ‘that continually structures the organization’s
reality’, often related to:
o Spatial orientation
o Activities
o Substances
o Entities

When understanding organizational culture, metaphors can tell so much:

o Different metaphors may be aggregated into bigger, overarching themes
o Also pay attention to who is using which kind of metaphors, tells you a lot about
the organizational culture

6. Narratives
storytelling,
o To convey the organizational culture by telling stories about values, believes,
obligations  control function
 o (un)written rules and legitimized an normalized behavior and actions may be
justified through telling stories

7. Rites and ceremonies

Rite: brings together a number of discrete cultural forms into an ‘integrated, unified
public performance’
Ceremonies: connect several rites into a single occasion or event

Helps to understand organizational culture by observing and participating

6 types or rites, rites of:

o Passage
o Degregation
o Enhancement
o Renewal
o Conflict reduction
o Integration

8. Reflexive comments
Focus on language and discourse in order to reveal meaning and to understand human
behaviour. Statements that we make about our own actions.

Reflexiveness: we are not only actors but also observers of our own behavior and that
we can comment on our own behavior ‘from the outside’ in the form of:
o A plan: in the future
o A commentary: in the present moment
o An account: in the past (retrospectively)

9. Fantasy themes
Fantasy: creative and imaginative interpretation of event

Based on symbolic convergence theory: groups creating rhetoric visions of their social
world and what it is like to be in this world, sharing fantasy reinforces common beliefs,
goals, values and wishes

Rhetorical visions: come about through shared fantasies involving creative

interpretation and reflection on common themes reflecting beliefs, goals, and values

Cultural control, diversity, and change

Diversity
What is diversity?  according to literature:
- Demographic differences
- Social-economic status
 - Professions
- Knowledge, skills, abilities
- Personalities
- Behavior
- Identities
- Age

Why diversity in organizations?

- Ethical perspective: fairness
- Juridical perspective: laws & legislation
- Managerial perspective: the business case
- Critical perspective

Cultural control
Management often wants to control organizational culture and can do this to a certain extent
 ‘buying’ cultures by hiring fancy concepts from consultancies, may work but no guarantees:
cultures can’t be bought but need to be accepted and embraced
What they can do to control:
- Codification of values and believes.
- Promotion of interaction and close ties among empoyees.
- Taking care of newcomers through socialization activities.
- Carefully monitoring how organizational norms, practices, values are received and
executed by emloyees

Critical interpretivists
- Culture: does not appear separately from power structures within that same social
context  not just ‘how is culture constructed’ but also:
o By whom is culture constructed?
o For whom is culture constructed?
- Communication: enforces dominant power structures and a particular culture
privileging one group compared to others
- Counterinterpretation of certain meanings may challenge and possibly even change
legitimized and normalized aspects of organizational culture

Ideology: body of ideas that reflect the social needs or worldview of an individual, group or
culture

Interest theory: power struggle about which groups can institutionalize their own interests and
ideology in relation to other groups

Strain theory: adopting a certain ideology/worldview in order to be able to adequately deal

with the strains associated with a certain social role
Management’s ideologies give directions of which principles, feelings, actions and behaviors are
considered appropriate within the organizational context and which ones are not
 important: dialectic of control: every actor within the system has the opportunity to exert
power over the system and what is considered legitimate (unions etc.)

Stages of organizational socialization (Jablin)

1. Anticipatory socialization
o Recruitment activities
o Employer branding
2. Organizational entry and assimilation
o Formal vs. informal
o Mentoring
o ‘how things are done around here’
3. Organizational disengagement/exit
o integration may also lead to critical perspective and disengagement
o Influence of previous experience
o Possibly start of organizational change… or organizational exit

To achieve organizational diversity, recruitment and organizational entry is not enough!

 Organizational culture is very important to successfully change an organization into a
diverse workplace

Traditionalist perspective on cultural control, diversity and change

Why diversity:
- Beneficial for effectiveness and productivity
- Enhances creativity
- Improves group decision making
Diversity could also be seen as a legal requirement

Need skills to interact successfully in diverse environment

- Skills related to maintenance of self, health, psychological well-being, stress etc.
- Skills fostering relationship with people of different cultural background
- Cognitive skills that promote a correct perception of the other culture

Programs need to:

- Instruct people on how to understand the other’s behaviors and world views
- Integrate the voices of all employees, so that not one ideology silences voices of others
- Greater goal of these programs: the business case

 believe in a lot of managing these cultural differences, managers need to have several
competences and human resource systems need to be strong
Interpretive perspective on cultural control, diversity and change
Diversity is a complex and multi-layers process of socially constructed reality in organizations
 A lot of challenges related to diversity such as mobbing and conflict

Also benefits:
- Conflict
- Creativity
- Showing how organizations value difference
- General (management) opportunity

Critical perspective on cultural control, diversity, and change

No matter how much diversity there is, the powerful group still strives to sustain its power, no
matter what  it’s not about numbers, it’s about power

Gender:
- Sexual harassment
- Glass ceiling
- Feminine style of leadership and communication (no female leadership, only female
leaders)
- Women, feminist philosophy, cultural change
- Sexual orientation  dominance of heterosexual norm

Race and ethnicity:

- Controversies and possible solutions  questioning of capability

Class:
- Experience of class in relation to perceived treatment

Intersectionality: the interconnected nature of social categorization such as race, class and
gender (and much more) as they apply to a given individual or group, which create systems of
discrimination or disadvantage
- Origin: denote the various ways in which race and gender interact to shape the multiple
dimensions of black women’s employment experiences
- Intersectionality goes beyond gender and ethnicity; it includes all kinds of aspects of
diversity
- Taking intersectionality into account counteracts the limitations of essentialist and fixed
notions of diversity
 intersectional understanding of diversity also important for organizational culture,
practices, and interventions
Lecture 3
Communication

Communication: “Shared meaning created among two or more people through verbal &
nonverbal transaction” (Papa et al., 2014)... “relevant to at least one of
the persons involved”
 or,
- Transfer of information and meaning in human interaction
- Any behaviour that is perceived and interpreted (Watzalick, et al., 1967)
- “that which ties, links or connects any orderly relationships by providing
the bond through which they may exist or be perceived” (Dance & Larson 1976)

Related to: function and structure

- Function: content, goals, effects, activities in a system that serve a purpose
- Structure: channels of communication, patterns of interactions between team members
 Closely related

Communication: Verbal and non-verbal

Verbal: spoken or written forms of language code

 Code involves system of symbols, two views:
o Symbols help us express our thoughts
o Symbols determine our thoughts

Non-verbal: can be troublesome because unreliable, should be very careful to derive

interpretations out of them, three forms:
o Paralanguage: tone, pitch, rhythm, rate
o Kinesics (body movement):
 Regulators (nodding to indicate listening)
 Adaptors (scratching your hand when thinking, self-taught)
 Emblems (peace sign on picture)
 Illustrations (pointing at something)
 affect displays (showing emotions with face)
o Proxemics (space)
 Fixed space: permanent, territory, e.g. big space means more succes
 Semifixed: movable, objects places in particular way e.g. leather couches
that could indicate formal setting, but not to the owners or ‘center pieces
 Informal: where interaction with collegues occurs

How to communicate? S M C R  source, message, channel, receiver

 - Senders are ‘creaters’ receivers are ‘consumers’
- Messages created and consumed through language in the context of media
- Consumer does not interpret message perfectly
- People learn media by using media
Halls theory of low and high context cultures: in some cultures the contecs is high because you
have to pay attention to meaning by non-verbal communication (japan, Spain, Brazil) whilst in
low context cultures, the risk of not bringing the message perfectly is avoided by being very
clear about what you are meaning to say (UK, Europe, USA)

Communication and the perspectives

Traditional: Farance:
- Production: work-connected to coordinate & control activities to produce system
outputs eg. Instructions
- Maintenance: regulate system processes, keep organisation stable e.g. policies, rules,
feedback, self-worth i.e. employee of the month, value of interaction, achieving goals
- Innovation: new ideas, implementing changes e.g. mission, structure, work procedures

Dance & Larson:

- Linking: form relationships with society for development and maintenance of self e.g.
cooperation
- Mentation: stimulates development of higher order mental processes e.g. brainstorming
for solutions
- Regulation of behavior: self by others; self by self; others by self e.g. meetings

Interpretive: Mead
- Symbolic interactionism: reality is socially constructed, e.g. smoking, gender & race
- The self is constructed through interaction with others
- The ‘generalized other’: view yourself as others view you

Berger & Luckmann:

- Communications as construction
- In organizations, we have shared expectations about habits.
- Maintained through educating (e.g., traineeship)
- Environment influences meanings

Critical: communication functions to control and manipulate power

Bakhtin
- Dialogism: meaning comes from dialogue, noting can exist without meaning
- Communication does not stand alone: always connected to previous or next
communication
- Struggles over meanings: tension between forces of unity and forces of difference

Hegemony:
 - Oppressed group accepts dominant group’s power
- systematically distorted communication, because of power relations.
- communicative action (conflict resolution through compromise) versus open or latent
strategic action (purposive-rational action) e.g. “hidden agenda”
Lecture 4

Group relationships

Groups can de decision-making or problem-solving entities, but can be more than that:
- Group membership important for individual identity construction
- Frame of reference for action/behavior
- Sensemaking for organizational experience

Communication needs to be appropriate and effective, three components

- Knowledge
- Skill
- Motivation

Needs to be appropriate and effective because

- Accomplishment of individual and group goals
- Relational aspect
- Explicit and implicit rules

Traditional perspective
Groups are considered as substances of a company

External vs internal perspective: Groups do not only face external challenges when executing a
task, but also internal challenges related to group members’ different ideas, values,
perspectives, interests etc.

High and low interdependence between groups (how much exchange there is within a group, if
the groups are connected)
- Benefit: no miscommunication, efficiency (which traditional focusses on)
- Con: takes a lot of time, not too efficient, can bring up conflict since they all have
different interest

Different types of groups

1. Quality circles
Experts come together and they discuss a certain aspect (small groups)

2. Focus groups
Less structured groups with one facilitator, talking about opinions
 3. Task-forces
Coming together in a planned situation and want to get things done, have a certain agenda

Six ways of group decision making (according to Shein)

- Lack of response
- Authority rule
- Minority coalition
- Majority rule
- Consensus
- Unanimity
 Which one is the preferred one depends on the situation

Whenever a decision is best made by one individual or with a group depends on the situation,
time, goals etc  table on the slides

Importance of communicative behaviors and interaction patterns: effective groups were much
more attentive to procedures used to solve problems

Four basic conditions for team effectiveness:

1. Motivated members
2. Adequate time and informational resources for the task
3. Competent leadership
4. Direct organizational assistance

Four stages of the group decision making process

1. Orientation
2. Conflict
3. Emergence
4. Reinforcement
 importance of specific situation of the group

Roles and role categories in groups (still traditional)

Role: an ongoing pattern of behavior that follows from a person’s understanding of how others
who are associated with him or her in the task think

Types Gerloff & Cummins

1. Perceived role
2. Expected role
3. Enacted role

Different types Benne & Sheats

- Taks roles: Initiator, information seeker, secretary
- Maintenance roles: encourager, harmonizer, comedian, gatekeeper, follower
- Self-centered roles: blocker, aggressor, dominator, deserter
 Not only one role per person and not only one person per role!

Interpretive perspective

Focus on how groups socially create the reality that structures and informs their experiences

Bona fide group perspective:

- Groups cultural context establishes norms and values
- Norms and values are developed and changed through member actions

Bona fide vs. ‘container model’ of groups

- Container: groups are closed entities with fixed boundaries
- Bona fide: Focusses on role of environment

Norms: standard of behavioral expectations shared by group members against which the
validity of perceptions is judged and the appropriateness of feelings and behavior is evaluated
- Either developed within group or imported from external context in which the group
operates

Group communication offers:

- Frames of reference to understand and justify the organization and its mission
- Through collective discourse
- The group is considered ‘the unit of social life’ where meanings and values are
negotiated

Decision making and culture

- Processes and understanding of decision making may differ in different cultural contexts
o E.g. collectivism vs. individualism
 C: prioritizing group cohesion over individual pursuits, sacrifice own
benefits for sake of society
 I: focus on human independence, against external interferences
regarding personal choices, more rational
 - One is not neccessarily better than the other
- Also, essentialist thinking does not help at all... There is always more aspects involved
than the one focussed on (e.g. collectivism vs. individualsim)

Critical perspective

Created structures by groups may be:

- Oppressing
- Empowering

Dialectic of control: looking how the group is structured in sense of power, who makes the final
decisions?

Cyclical relationship between social structure and human action

Structural theory suggests:
- Group members create the structures that guide their actions through producing and
reproducing those structures in everyday interaction
- Group members may also change the meaning of structures by acting differently

Company ‘borrels’ can be seen as a structure within an company, could he hindering for people
who need to go home etc.

Chapter 10. Leader-member relationships

Traditional perspective
- Essence of effective leadership is about exercising influence over employees

Interpretive perspective
- Social constructions of leadership as a constructed reality

Critical perspective
- Leadership as a tool of power to (re)enforce the interests and positions of the dominant
social groups

Traditional perspective
Leadership as a trait  Leadership is not related to certain personality traits... Leadership is
nothing innate (aangeboren)!

Leadership as a style
Early style theory:
- Laissez-faire: hands-off method, letting followers set own rules
- Authoritarian: authority by leader
- Democratic: followers get a say
Leadership in Grid (more attitudinal than behavioral oriented)
- Eight managerial/leadership styles
- Concern for production
- Concern for people

Transformational leadership
- Change members values
- Different from other styles in:
o Styles operate on a continuum of performance effectiveness
o Any manager may exhibit any one or all of the styles
o Concerned with emotions, values, symbolic behaviour, meaning-making

Situational/contingent theory of leadership: there is no ideal style of leadership, it is all context

dependent

Fields situational model:

Most effective style of leadership depends on
- Leader-member relationships
- Task structure
 - Position power

Leader-member exchange theory:

- Leaders differ in their behavior towards different people
- Research shows that different members also appreciate different LMX
- Good and bad LMX also affects communication styles and attitudes between leaders and
members
 self-fulfilling prophecy: whenever a member gets positive motivation from the leader, the
member will probably try harder, which makes the leader then again more positive
Upward influence: members influencing the leader
- Depends on the quality of the relationship
- Depends on degree of power difference

Leadership as development:
- Mentor-protegé relationship
- Teaching
- Guidance
- Counselling
- Appraisal
- Sponsorship
- Career promotion

Interpretive perspective
Leadership as collective and pluralistic constructions of social reality and negotiated order as
opposed to leader as individual
- Symbolic power of leader discourse and its relation to other processes  meaning-
making for member

Leadership structure and meaning (Callaster and Chernartony)

- Branding an internal brand building: structural points that contribute to organizational
identity building
“Successful leaders are those who consistenly and repeteadly communicate messages to
employees about the brand identity and commitment to living brand’s promise”

Communication-based leader responsibilities

- Communicating appropriate values to create a moral climate
- Maintaining adequate communication to be informed of organizational operations
- Maintaining openness to signs of problems

Critical perspective
Key word is: Power
- Through manipulation of symbols and discourse, the interest of those with power are
disguised as the interest that should be shared by all members of the organization
 - Power in the context of leadership: dynamic process of signification and legitimation
involving interactions between leaders and followers

In the book the focus is on three topics:

1. Discourse of individual leaders in their efforts to influence members
2. Consequences of discursive practices of leadership and management groups in general
3. Discourse of resistance to leadership

The critical perspective challenges the view of the leader as an individual actor
- In fact, leaders act and communicate in a way that establishes an creates a certain
collective system
- Discourses of leaders can influence members
- Discourses of leaders to members may bear different messages, depending on how they
are brought about and what is communicated
- Mystifies leadership by using jargon which members don’t understand
o Pseydojargon in its ideolocial function: Constructing very technical anddifficult
sounding sentences, which do not really say anything

Focus on: how do leaders communicate and what does it do?

(pseuydojargon: trying to explain complex stuff more concrete, ‘dumb it down’)

Resistance and the perspectives:

- Traditional: How to manage / overcome resistance?
- Interpretive perspective: How does resistance play out in negotiated order of the
organization?
- Critical perspective: How does resistance contribute to workplace emancipation and
democratization?
o See organizational members as “part of the system” through normalization:
Power difference and systematic inequalities in organizations are so “normal”,
that organizational members often do not even recognize them...
o Normalization needs to be made more visible, as only then resistance, and with
that, change can come about
o Processes of normalization may be considered antipodes of problematization
(Maguire & Hardy, 2013)

Lecture 5 – Communication & Culture

Communication within an organization depends on situation:

- Channel
- Type
- Audience
- Target
Traditional perspective
1. Channels perspective: system of pathways through which messages flow.
- Messages are flowing objects from point to point (tangible)

2. Observable network perspective: patterns of interaction among people who make up the
organization.
- Network = individuals linked by stream of info, influence, & affect

3.Perceived network perspective: from organizational members’ perspective, latent knowledge

that guides their communication.
- Can be perceived & experienced

Formal communications, four types:

1. Downward
- topics: Job instructions, job rationales, practices
- Weaknesses: inadequate info, information diffusion
2. Upward
o Task related, empowering the employees, employee participation
o Weaknesses:
 people rather perceive information than give it
 managers may not be supportive as they only want to
hear positive information
 (in combination with above) distorted/too positive
o Used with complains, feedback etc
3. Horizontal
o Communication between organs at the same level within
different departments
o Facilitates participation in effective decision making and
ensures the organization can adapt easily
o Weaknesses:
 Territoriality, ‘they/us’, competitive
 Rivalry
 Specialization, use different types of jargon
 Lack of motivation
o Used for advice

4. Diagonal
o Talking to the boss (different level) in another department
o three types:
1. Quality circles
Small groups with task to solve problems to improve quality in the
organization
 a. Establishment of new communication relationships, two-way
communication, need large network range
b. Weaknesess: lack background info, not everyone represented
2. Lattice design
Each employee finds and joins a suitable team of choice
a. Non-hierarchical, small size, fast, direct communication encouraged
b. Weakness: very complex
3. Heterachies
Each team reports to another team, still no hierarchy but a form of
controlling by accountability
a. Think-tanks, heterarchies: flat in hierarchy, highlu interdependent
and capable of learning
b. Weakness: distortion (think about giving a message on and on to
people, the message changes because of interpretation)

Flat vs tall organizations

- Flat organizations can betrekken more people to make decisions
- Tall organisations have smaller teams and it gets more behapbaar, but difficult time
when having to change and might be hard to get controlled this much

There are also a lot of unofficial channels within a company, such as people having an affair or
golfing together
- This was first neglected by classical theorists; highlighted by human relations movement
For example rumors

Video
Talks about rumors, the drama triangle where rumors start, triangle: the victim, the rescuer,
and the prospector
Network perspective
Patterns of interaction among members

- Roles -Group members, liaisons, bridges, isolates

- Links–reciprocity, intensity, multiplexicity
- Structural characteristics –size, density, clustering, stability, conditions of membership,
connectedness
- Transactional content-expressions of affect, influence, information, and goods &services

Interpretivist perspective
Do not look at formal and informal communication separately
- All communication is important
- Structure is a social constructure
- Semantic networks: who shares common interpretation/meaning
- Communication structures influences the organizational culture
Video: the way you get taught your language determines how you think and shapes your
culture and the other way around. This can also happen within organizational culture

Critical perspective
- Struggles occur over meanings, how these struggles form rules for employees
- Structures form rule systems that control employees; the control is accepted because it
is internalized
- Structures maintain power relations: hierarchy serves the interests of those in power
and the oppressed accept it because they think it is the only way
- More flatter & participative structures allow for more diverse perspectives, creativity
and empowerment.
Information distortion used by those in power to sustain hegemony/power relations

Lecture 6 – Power and strategic communication

Status: A person’s rank or position within a group
Power: The capacity of actor A to get actor B to do things actor B would otherwise not do
 - Career as an example of relationship between status (e.g. Position/rank in the
organization) and power: “each phase of a career presents opportunities for the
accumulation or attenuation of resources for power”
- Status and power are not traits related to a particular position, have to be accorded
- Power enhances status, status enhances power

Traditional perspective on power

Five types of power:
1. Reward power: ability to apply awards
2. Coercive power: ability to control and apply punishment
3. Referent power: members desire to be like the dominant person: either similar or
complementary behavior, adopting values and attitudes of a relevant group
4. Expert power: specific knowledge regarding certain topic/task/problem
5. Legitimate power: ‘right’ to exercise authority based on legitimized norms and values
Interpretivist perspective on power
Construct share reality through communication so through language we give meaning
and create our world and so also the power relations
- Example: shared meaning of Americans about Mexican immigrants in ‘Danger of a Single
Story’

Critical perspective on power

- Power is dominance and oppression
- Communication and power are connected
- Language is used to create and maintain power imbalances
o Example: politicians/elite using the media to communicate about the Mexican
immigrants in Danger of a Single Story in order to maintain power/priviledge
- Power/inequality is legitimized
o Example: treating the Mexican immigrants unfairly is legitimized because they
are “abusing the system”

Frost (1987)
1. Organizational life is significantly influenced by the quest for and exercise of power
by organizational actors, which constitute the political activity of the organization
2. Power exists both on the surface level of organizational activity and deep within the
very structure of the organizations.
3. Communication plays a vital role in the development of power relations and the
exercise of power
4. The manipulation and exercise of power is expressed in the sense both of actions and
relations, as organizational games

Feminism
Need for empowerment to substitute the traditional concept of power
- Hierarchy is power over others  needs to become power over others
o Does not mean suppressing or ignoring differences

Poststructuralism
Focus on multiple meanings that can be assigned to texts
 - Actions need to be interpreted from the standpoint of multiple people who have
observed action

Power and conflict only connected when colleagues see each other as obstacles, need to m
mutually empower each other through cooperation

Conflict
Interdependent people who believe there is opposition in goals or values
- Can be due to power
- Conflict can also be necessary

Traditionalist perspective on conflict:

- focused on resolution and effectiveness
- studies styles, strategies, processes

Competence-based approach to conflict

3 strategies
- impressions of communication
- Appropriateness
- Effectiveness

3 phases
- Differentiation – focus on information sharing and seeking
- Mutual problem description
- Integratio
o Recognizing and withholding attributions
o Maintaining cooperative tactics
o Generating multiple solutions
o Evaluating advantages and disadvantages of solutions
o Selecting and clarifying a solution
o Monitoring system for implementation of solution

Lecture 7 – Social Media Communication

Definition of social media is splitted into traditional (newspapers etc.) and new digital social
media
(Important for the exam to know these three steps)

Exploratory learning
- Patrolling user-generated content and trends
- Taking up market information
- Communicate between businesses

Transformative learning
- Storing and searching for knowledge
- Enabling crowdsourcing
- Leveraging collective intelligence

Exploitive learning
- Developing new business applications
- Accessing new markets more easily
- Create viral word-to-mouth

Lecture 8 – OCC as an individual experience

Identity in organizations
Paper Alvesson, Ashcraft, Thomas

Traditional: about organizational outcome and improving effectiveness

Interpretive: how do we as a group construct identity? Shared process. How you relate yourself
to other people and how you create a shared identity

Critical: focusing on the dominant narrative, looking at the organization what does it want to
achieve? What does it stand for? And making the people who work there take in these beliefs.

Individuals as embedded and defined in social groups: how do individuals find their positions
within a certain group? -? Social identity theory and self-categorization theory (traditional)
Individuals engaged in ongoing identity construction: Continuing your identity while performing
tasks in your context, used to construct and understand of self that is coherent and positively
valued (interpretive)

The self as target of managerial control: regulation and resistance, how is identity accomplished
through operations of power? How we see ourselves in the organizations (critical)

We need to look at identity because:

- To provide solutions, effectiveness (t)
- To understand human and organizational experiences (i)
- Reveal problems associated with cultural/political irrationalities ©

Who is constructing/influencing identity: Individuals themselves but also ‘extra-individual’

forces (agents, discourses, institutionalized cultural patterns

What can you look at to understand identities:

- Embodied practices (company borrels)
- Material and institutional arrangements arrangements
- Discursive formations
- Story-telling performance
- Group and social relations
- Anti-identities

When do identity constructions take place?

- Ongoing process
- Result of critical incident
- Irrelevant question
Where and how can we study this social phenomenon of identity construction:
- Interviews
- (participant) observations
- Reading texts

Paper Ethnic identity positioning at work

Diversity comes with structures of power and dominant ….

From diversity to inequality, steps

1. Diversity
2. (dis)similarity
3. Inequality

An organization starts with diversity but forgets to implement it within the organization and
remains to have one dominant way of doing in the company, the other more differentiated are
seen as ‘different’ and dissimilarity arises, and inequality starts
 Teaching case: Who you are
In this example of ABCD, the dominant culture of the firm is built around the idea of a domestic
white male

‘The concept of identity appears to be at the core of understanding diversity’

Identity: a dynamic process, a changing view of the self and the other, constantly acquiring new
meanings and forms through interactions with social contexts and within historical moments
(Ghorashi, 2001)

Career: is constituted by the actor herself, in interactions with others, as she moves through
time and space (Cohen et al. 2004)

‘Othering’: domestic dominant group looking at the minority as ‘other’ and different.
Powerful groups (does not need to be the biggest group by numbers) define subordinate
groups into existence in a reductionist way which ascribes problematic and inferior
characteristics to these subordinate groups
 being other than the norm means being inferior to the norm

Individual sensemaking: hegemonic norm functions as counterpart to ethnic identity salience

and thus elicits processes of othering

Interactions: Judgement based on ethnic

Processes of normalization = antipodes of problematization

once things are normalized, they are not seen as a problem anymore, which is problematic, this
needs to be challenged!
Discussion of the teaching case was held now