What might explain why people who are perceived as strong leaders avoid leaving a paper trail of writings
Communication in organizations, broadly speaking, is the transactional, symbolic process in which the activities of a social collective are coordinated to achieve individual and collective goals. The modern field has a more recent lineage through business information studies published in the 1930s through the 1950s. Until then, only handful of people had a particular interest in speaking and writing in business settings. Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon wrote in 1947 about "organization communications systems", saying communication is "absolutely essential to organizations". In 1954, Chris Argyris published Personality and Organization, which singled out "organizational communication" for special attention. Argyris made the case that what passed for organizational communication at the time was based on unstated and indefensible propositions such as "management knows best" and "workers are inherently stupid and lazy." He accused the emerging field of relying on untested gimmicks designed to trick employees into doing management's will.
Some of the main assumptions underlying much of the early organizational communication research were:
- Humans act rationally. Sane people behave in rational ways, they generally have access to all of the information needed to make rational decisions they could articulate, and therefore will make rational decisions, unless there is some breakdown in the communication process.
- Formal logic and empirically verifiable data ought to be the foundation upon which any theory should rest. All we really need to understand communication in organizations is (a) observable and replicable behaviors that can be transformed into variables by some form of measurement, and (b) formally replicable syllogisms that can extend theory from observed data to other groups and settings.
- Communication is primarily a mechanical process, in which a message is constructed and encoded by a sender, transmitted through some channel, then received and decoded by a receiver. Distortion, represented as any differences between the original and the received messages, can and ought to be identified and reduced or eliminated.
- Organizations are mechanical things, in which the parts (including employees functioning in defined roles) are interchangeable. What works in one organization will work in another similar organization. Individual differences can be minimized or even eliminated with careful management techniques.
- Organizations function as a container within which communication takes place. Any differences in form or function of communication between that occurring in an organization and in another setting can be identified and studied as factors affecting the communicative activity.
Herbert Simon introduced the concept of bounded rationality which challenged assumptions about the perfect rationality of communication participants. He maintained that people making decisions in organizations seldom had complete information, and that even if more information was available, they tended to pick the first acceptable option, rather than exploring further to pick the optimal solution. Reaching a wider audience, including seniors, means thinking broadly about what constitutes communication and how best to communicate. A first step is to define the means or "medium" to reach clients and customers.
Businesses communicate largely through advertising and written information. But they also communicate each time they answer the telephone, greet clients at an office, branch or store, or broadcast over a public address system. One example is that in a medical clinic, pay attention not only to written or illustrative material handed out during a visit, but also to the telephone answering system, the directional signage, the comfort of the seating, the acoustics of the waiting room, and the interpersonal listening and communication skills of doctors, nurses and reception staff. Another example is when announce a change in a government program or service, mass media advertising, widely distributed pamphlets or brochures, or cheque or utility bill inserts might reach a sizeable proportion of seniors.
The medium should suit not only the audience but also the nature of the message. Media are not created equal, and research shows that success in reaching target audiences and implanting messages