Introduction
“Today we live in one of those portentous times in history when the entire structure of human knowledge suffers once again the convulsions of change as old barriers collapse. In the same way that we now restructure companies and entire economies, we are completely reorganizing the production and distribution of knowledge and the symbols used to transmit it ”1
In the opinion of some authors, we experience the impact of the third great wave of change in history and, as a result, we are in the process of creating a new civilization to succeed industrial civilization just as it succeeded its predecessor the agricultural one..
The point is that many of the changes that occur in society's knowledge system are directly translated into business operations. So this knowledge system becomes a part of the entire business environment.
Consequently, paradigms of the second wave (resulting from the industrial revolution) are broken and, for example, the achievement of cost savings for huge series of identical products, to ensure economies of scale, the demands of the current market force the creation of personalized products and services, for which a mass production is imposed and at the same time is competitive in costs, which is only possible thanks to new information technologies that allow to minimize the cost of diversity. This is the case of computer programs coupled to equipment and machinery that allow the most rational use of materials in the production of diverse assortments; Just-In-Time Inventory systems that eliminate warehousing costs and ensure production to order;to current studies on superconductivity that will revolutionize energy consumption levels for large energy-consuming productions.
The development and distribution of information have therefore become factors of productivity and power, crucial for contemporary life. This new doctrine leads to a more flexible, fast, decentralized and information-rich system that allows the administration to evaluate, concentrate resources and use a well-trained but highly decentralized command for decision-making aimed at overcoming adversaries in the field. market.
But converting knowledge and information into a productive factor needs to pass through man as a living support for data, information and knowledge.
It is then that it is necessary to speak of communication in the company as a factor in the achievement of "organizational intelligence" in the creation of value for its clients, conceived as the result of a total effort and not an isolated stage in the process. Thus, both the worker who directly transforms raw materials and materials to create a use value, as well as the designer who interprets the unmet needs of potential consumers and translates them into a productive technical solution, even the simplest employee of the company that contributes with its work to the creation of a positive image of it, which also adds value to the product or service.
And to ensure that this value creation process develops properly and that all the links in the organization can combine their efforts consistently and oriented towards the same goal, a communication process is required that ensures the necessary interrelationships in terms of identification and contact between the participants in the value creation process, that is, the Organization's human group.
The objective of this work is to analyze the demands imposed by the development of modern Administration on the business communication process.
Business Communication
“Just as open and honest communication is needed in any relationship to remain healthy, relationships within the corporation improve when communication is shared freely and diligently” 2
What makes a company competitive is its ability to create products or services with value for the customer and this is only achieved by companies configuring their value chain3, which implies not only organizing and harmonizing the different activities of the company, whether these primary or support, to display the greatest value for the client with the least possible expense, but to effectively insert it into the value system of the sector, which implies coordination and linkage through alliances or other means, but which in any case implies a necessary insertion of the company in the value system of that competitive sector.
And, how to achieve all this without effectively relating the men who are in the company in cooperative situations; both its leaders and these with their subordinates, as well as the workers and employees between them and all of them with their environment? The obvious answer is no less relevant: communicating, since when men interact by mutual agreement and for productive purposes, the existence of a code that allows them to understand each other is essential to carry out actions that complement each other to achieve an end.
Communication is a process of wide relevance in the functioning of any group, Organization or society, hence in the Organization Theory, communication plays a central place, since the structure, size and scope of the Organization are almost totally determined by communication.
Business communication occurs not only within the Organization but also with the environment, so we can speak of Internal Communication and External Communication.
Internal Communication is one that takes place between the members of a group or between groups that belong to a labor entity and can be developed in a formal and informal way.
The organizational structure tends to affect the communication process, therefore internal communication occurs in a highly structured process, which determines that communication between subordinates and the superstructure is very different from that between equals.
In order to carry out its activities, each Organization, in accordance with its organizational structure and the functions of each position, establishes the quantity and nature of the communicational contacts that must be made between workers at the same level and between them and the workers of the upper and lower level, in order to guarantee the achievement of the objectives set by it. This communication, a formal call, takes place in various directions, which are called information flows, which can be: horizontal and vertical.
Horizontal communication is that which takes place between levels and positions located at the same level of the hierarchical structure. Through horizontal communication, coordination and cooperation between people belonging to the same group or collective and between groups and collectives is carried out.
This type of communication not only guarantees the cooperation and coordination necessary to carry out a task, but also facilitates the satisfaction of the socio-psychological needs of individuals.
Vertical communication occurs between levels and positions belonging to different levels of the hierarchical structure and can be both descending and ascending.
Downward communication refers to messages that are produced from higher authority levels or positions to lower authority levels or positions. The downward flow regularly contains orders, orientations, regulations and evaluations of work, which are basic for any Organization, since they establish the frequency and nature of the communicative acts that must be carried out by the different levels and positions, as well as the actions that guarantee achievement. of the entity's social and economic objectives.
The ascending communication refers to the messages emitted by the lower levels and positions towards the levels and positions of greater authority in the labor entity; that is, in the reverse direction of the downward flow.
The upward flow generally contains information related to the functioning and performance of the work of the level that it reports, degree of acceptance and understanding of the guidance received, difficulties that arise in carrying out a task, as well as suggestions and assessments regarding the activity. The upward flow provides the leader with information for decision-making and, due to its feedback nature, in turn generates a downward flow.
Although formal communication is prescribed by each Organization for each of its members and levels of the structure, it is not only this type of communication that takes place among its workers. Organized human beings in any organizational structure tend to establish relationships with each other that go beyond those prescribed by the Organization for the performance of the tasks entrusted to it.
Informal communication is therefore that which takes place between the members of a group or collective spontaneously, without the mediation of institutional prescriptions. Informal communications do not emanate from the demands or functions of work, they originate due to the needs of affective and social contact that people experience. Informal communication, therefore, is linked to the contact and identification needs of the members of a group who have common interests and affinities.
It is common to find the criterion that informal communications are inconvenient for the smooth running of work and therefore should be eliminated through prohibitions or with a marked emphasis on established formal rules. It should be noted that this type of communication does not necessarily have negative effects on work, and rather the advantages and disadvantages that it may present should be evaluated in a fair measure, balancing the positive effects that it causes in increasing the feeling of belonging of the individual to the work group, the decrease in job rotation, the development of creative initiatives, etc., as opposed to its negative effect on labor discipline, its distorting effect on formal communication or as a source of conflict.
The company, as a social system, is an open system in which continuous informational exchanges take place with other entities and people located at the local, national and international level, which makes up the external communication of the Organization.
This external communication has the function of keeping the entity in contact with the external environment: it provides it with the necessary information for its development and adaptation to the changing conditions of the environment and emits messages that indicate its position, strength, stability, etc. that is, they convey their institutional image. Although this is a very important and complex part of business communication, it will not be analyzed in this work, so from now on, if not indicated otherwise, we will be referring only to internal communication.
In summary, business communication aims to:
- Integrate workers to the objectives, goals and standards of the company. For this, communication must promote the motivation of the worker in the achievements of the Company and create a feeling of belonging of the individual to the entity. Establish a favorable socio-psychological climate in the company. This is largely linked to the type of communication established between workers and managers and between workers, where clarity, honesty, collaboration and personalization are present. This motivates the worker and increases their productivity and helps new workers to integrate as quickly as possible, without conflicts, to the company. Encourage staff participation. For this, workers must be informed of what to do,existing rules and regulations as well as expectations of what is expected of them. The clarity of the worker of the assigned objectives will help him to participate in the realization of the objectives of the company, becoming involved in them Decrease the rates of staff turnover from the fact that the company is a place that meets the expectations of the workers, not only in relation to the recognition of their performance but also in the possibility that it offers them to make contributions Contribute to raising the qualification of the personnel, in which informal communication plays an important role to the extent that it favors the process of transfer of the best experiences Create an external image of the company, consistent with the corporate identity, which favors its proper positioning in the market.Achieve a permanent adaptation to changes in the environment, through updated knowledge of the competition sector in such a way that allows you to know the most exactly the needs, desires and behavior of your current and potential customers, the movements of your competitors and the rest of environmental factors that facilitate or hinder business activity, in order to develop and deploy a suitable strategy to ensure success.in order to develop and deploy a suitable strategy to ensure success.in order to develop and deploy a suitable strategy to ensure success.
Consequently, business communication provides the means for making and executing decisions, obtaining feedback and correcting organizational objectives depending on the demands of the situation.
Communication and administration
"… the true root of inefficiency is the high cost of communication" 4
It is not possible to analyze communication in the company, independent of the evolution of the Administration, since each moment in its evolution marks certain economic-productive demands that, of course, are reflected in the social field and give a distinctive stamp to the communication.
There is a large number of studies that characterize the evolution of Administration over time, but there is consensus in considering the existence of three major schools for the study of Organizational Behavior: the School of Scientific Management, started in 1911 and popular until the decade of the 30; the School of Human Relations, predominant until the 1960s, when the School of Systems was imposed. It should be noted that the appearance of a new school does not completely replace the previous one, so there are currently followers of the first two and in fact, each of the previous two has a strong influence on the current School of Systems,Therefore, it is useful to understand each of these theoretical positions to be able to have a complete vision of how organizations work and the role of communication in them.
School of Scientific Management
This school, also known as Taylorism, in reference to its founder, marked the introduction of scientific methods in the conduct of Organizations, hence its name.
This school was preceded by the development of a whole body of principles of the Administration, on the part of business executives and professors of North American universities, influenced without a doubt by European authors such as Henry Fayol, since at this time the Scholars of the social sciences were not interested in the study of Organizations in general or companies in particular. These were times of learning from experience and a pragmatism that seemed to work.
Taylor analyzes the worker as a "human machine", so he focuses his attention on matching the capabilities of the worker with the tasks, for which he divides each task into small movements and conducts time studies to carry them out. The assumption of this school was that operations could be better understood if the whole activity were divided into its elementary parts and then these pieces were put together again to make up the total system.
With his time and motion studies, Taylor was able to significantly increase productivity, increasing the performance of workers and reducing the personnel needs of factories based on the principles he formulated: Science, Harmony, Cooperation, Efficiency and Prosperity. These principles based his system of labor reward to the "economic man", in relation to which he assumed that the worker was deeply irrational and disinterested in work if left alone but could respond adequately under monetary stimuli.
Regarding communication, Taylor says little, his emphasis was on organizational structure and individual behavior. Communication had to be formal, hierarchical and planned, the purpose of which was limited to ensuring the completion of tasks in order to increase efficiency and productivity. In short, Taylorism conceived communication in a unidirectional and top-down way, only linked to the execution of tasks. For his part, Fayol recognizes that the formal structure constituted a barrier to communication flows, so he proposes to allow horizontal communication, violating the vertical structure, only as an exception in crisis situations when quick actions are required, which It is known by the name of "Puente de Fayol".
The School of Scientific Management recognizes that there may be communication problems in Organizations, at least when some "principles" are not adequately respected, say for example if the scope of control of a manager is very broad, that is, if he has more than 6 subordinates. On the other hand, this school also distinguishes the communication functions of line and staff managers, so the former must only communicate orders to subordinates and check that they are carried out, while the latter have the function of persuading their boss to accept. his advice.
In general, the School of Scientific Management does not give a very significant role to communication and conceives it vertically, limited to the issuance of orders and the control of their fulfillment, through formal channels. This point of view assumes that those who are above the organizational pyramid possess the relevant information and their function in communication is to disseminate that knowledge.
School of Human Relations
The revolution against the School of Scientific Management was carried out by Chester I. Barnard, President of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company and Elton Mayo, professor at Harvard University Business School and reached its peak in late the 1940s and the following decade, as a result of the studies carried out by Mayo at the Hawthorne Plant, which revolutionized the existing conceptions about human behavior and motivation in Organizations that overthrew the conception of the worker as an extension of the machines.
This school verified that the workers constituted an integrated group with their own norms and code of behavior, valid to establish and maintain their own production standards.
Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) considered the studies at Hawthorne as one of the main empirical investigations that led to the "rediscovery" of the primary group and therefore the importance of informal interpersonal relationships in situations hitherto conceptualized as strictly formal and atomistic.
In contrast to the conception of the "economic man" of the School of Scientific Management, which responds directly to monetary incentives, the School of Human Relations conceives of man as a "social being", which responds to the interpersonal influences of the work group.
In contrast to the monetary incentives proposed by the previous school, this one suggests that a more appropriate strategy would be to study the needs of the workers and then satisfy them. Thus increased job satisfaction will presumably lead to increased production.
This conception leads to the conception of a participatory management style that involves the workers, in which an ascending flow of communication appears in the form of suggestions from subordinates about the improvement of the Organization; In this sense, another member of this school, Rensis Likert, spoke for whom this participatory style should involve workers in the decision-making process in order to reconcile conflicts between the goals of the Organization and those of individuals.
As is clear from what has been said so far, the School of Human Relations saw communication with greater importance than Taylorism and conceived communication not as a means for the bosses to address the workers, but also for the administration to listen to what the workers mean. That is, this humanistic approach to communication aims to achieve "satisfied" workers. To do this, they understand and accept informal communication between "equals", and approach communication as a boss - subordinate interaction, in order to make communication synonymous with motivation and leadership in Organizations.
The School of Systems
Unlike its predecessors that arise from practical experience and empirical research, this school is based on the theoretical bases provided by the General Theory of Systems.
It arises between the 60s and 70s as a synthesis of the Schools of Scientific Management of Human Relations as part of the assumption that the principles of each school could be applicable but to different types of Organizations and thus this school broadened the spectrum of types of Organization that he analyzed applying the General Theory of Systems.
The application of this approach to the study of organizations starts from the premise that an organization is a system made up of a series of elements that have their own goals. The organizational goal is to achieve optimal efficiency as a whole, so that the maximum efficiency of part of its elements is not as significant as that of the whole.
An Organization is an open system, made up of a set of component subsystems, each of which fulfills a certain function and interacts with other subsystems. The Organization receives information and energy from its environment and, after processing these elements, generates a result. Thus, changes in the environment have a continuous impact on the Organization, which will be constantly adjusting to its environment; on the other hand, internal changes in the Organization, in turn, have a continuous impact on its environment. In this way, the School of Systems emphasizes the interrelations and exchanges between the Organization and its environment, unlike the Schools of Scientific Management and Human Relations that studied the Organization as an isolated entity, looking inside it,explanations of organizational behavior.
The School of Systems emphasizes the interdependence of the component subsystems of the system. If we consider the Organization as a system, then this interdependence depends on communication. Communication is the basic process that facilitates the interdependence of the parts of the total system, it is the coordination mechanism, hence the role of communication is to harmonize the Organization.
Since the Organization depends for its subsistence on communication networks and systems that make it possible to keep in touch with the environment and, for all the people who work in it to work in concert, it can be said that it is these communication flows that allow to this stay as a coherent unit and therefore reach the conclusion that Organizations are, in essence, communication systems.
As a summary, Annex 1 presents a comparative table of the nature of communication conceived by each School.
Conclusions
“Communication is the lifeblood of an organization; if we could somehow remove communication flows from an organization, we would not have an organization ”5
The success of a company depends to a large extent on the efficiency of its operations and this in turn depends on the human element.
However, personnel management is complex, since the subjective order is decisive and is governed by a great diversity of factors, so that prioritized attention to the communication system within the company can help create a favorable climate for employees. institutional objectives, that motivate staff to integrate their efforts in achieving them, to act with all the wealth of possibilities of their potential.
We live in an era that is advancing at breakneck speed in a wave of economic, political and social change. What particularly identifies the economy of this third wave is that, in contrast to finite natural resources, labor, raw materials and capital, knowledge that is, for all intents and purposes, inexhaustible is enhanced. For this reason, it is necessary to pay special attention to the necessary communication relationships that must be produced in Organizations to ensure that this infinite factor of production is taken advantage of, in such a way as to ensure the key to business profitability and its competitiveness.
In this way, an adequate communication system in the company can contribute, if it is oriented in the strategic direction of the organization, to modify the organizational culture for the benefit of its results in three main directions:
- Make the Organization more horizontal and less hierarchical, which has a decisive impact on the quality of the product / service it produces, thanks to a better and direct participation of workers in the creation of value for the customer. Make the Organization more transparent through shared knowledge and projecting itself in correspondence abroad, thereby creating, strengthening and taking advantage of the distinctive advantages of the company to turn them into a competitive advantage, since good communication is a prerequisite for teaching and learning. intellectual work, by enhancing group work and the value of formal and informal communications, in order to increase production,productivity and business competitiveness with the application of knowledge and creativity to the rational use of resources.
For this, communication in Organizations must be understood beyond a process of information exchange, or a simple means of influence, but as a social process of interaction on the basis of which an "organizational conscience" is formed that marks an identity. corporate, that is, a culture and way of doing things for the Organization.
The quality of this communication depends on whether the workforce of an Organization stays in contact, develops trust, provides help, monitors performance and shares a vision, strengthening the feeling of belonging as a way of creating relationships within and outside the Organization.
Good communication allows information to be shared, because although information is power, this power is meaningless if it is kept hidden and for an Organization to function, power must be shared.
____________
1 Alvin and Heidi Toffler. The creation of a new civilization. Page 42
2 Max De Pree. Leadership is an art. Page 103
3 See M. Porter. Competitive advantage
4 Henry Mintzberg. Mintzberg and the address. Page 255
5 Everett M. Rogers and Rekha Agarwala-Rogers. Communication in Organizations. Page 7
6 Adapted from Everett M. Rogers and Rekha Agarwala-Rogers. Communication in Organizations. Page 31 and 56
Bibliography consulted
- Calderón, Lilliam. Communication in the work of the leader. Havana city. CETED. UH, 1991 Cubillo, Julio. "Strategies to create information and knowledge systems in the 90s. Some reflections". In Information Sciences. Vol. 26. No. 4. December 1995. PROINFO. Havana City De Pree, Max. Leadership is an art. Mexico. Lasser Press Mexicana, 1990 Holms Quiroga, Ricardo. The communication within the company. Mexico. Grupo Editorial Iberoamericano, 1990 Mintzberg, Henry. Mintzberg and the address. Madrid. Díaz de Santos, 1991 Porter, Michael. Competitive advantage: Creating and sustaining superior performance. Mexico. Inc. Continental Publishing, 1990 Rogers, Everett M. and Rekha Agarwala Rogers. Communication in Organizations. New York. The Free Press, 1976 Toffler, Alvin and Heidi. The creation of a new civilization.The politics of the third wave. Barcelona. Plaza & Jones, 1995
Appendix 1
| NATURE OF ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION ACCORDING TO THE THREE SCHOOLS OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR 6 | |||
| SCHOOL OF SCIENTIFIC DIRECTION | SCHOOL OF HUMAN RELATIONS | SYSTEMS SCHOOL | |
| Importance of communication | Relatively unimportant, with an emphasis on formal written channels | Relatively important. Emphasis on interpersonal channels especially between equals. Formal and informal communication | Very important, it is considered the "cement" that holds together the subsystems in an Organization |
| Purpose of communication | Give orders and information about the tasks and to achieve obedience and coordination in the execution of that work | Satisfy the needs of workers, provide lateral interaction between equals in work groups and facilitate the participation of members in organizational decision making | Control and coordinate provide information to decision-makers and to adjust the Organization to changes in the environment |
| Directions of communication flows | Downward, from bosses to subordinates to persuade or convince them to follow instructions | Horizontal between equals who belong to work groups; vertical between bosses and subordinates: 1. To assess the needs of workers 2. To enable participatory decision-making | In all directions within the system and across the boundaries of the Organization with the outside |
| Main communication problems they recognize | Failures due to: 1. Violation of hierarchical levels 2. Excessive scope of control | Rumors and partially ineffective formal communication that is replaced by informal communication | Excess, distortion, omission, and disregard for negative feedback |
