Fundamentals of Management, 8th ed

374

Part 4: Leading

Copyright 2016 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.

---

Psychologists, however, are beginning to associate some problems with these

communication advances. For one thing, managers who are seldom in their “real”

office are likely to fall behind in their field and to be victimized by organizational

politics because they are not present to keep in touch with what is going on and to

protect themselves. They drop out of the organizational grapevine and miss out on

much of the informal communication that takes place. Moreover, the use of digital

communication at the expense of face-to-face meetings and conversations makes it

hard to build a strong culture, develop solid working relationships, and create a mutu-

ally supportive atmosphere of trust and cooperativeness. Finally, electronic communi-

cation is opening up new avenues for dysfunctional employee behavior, such as the

passing of lewd or offensive materials to others. For example, a few years ago, the

New York Times fired almost 10 percent of its workers at one of its branch offices for

sending inappropriate e-mails at work.

INFORMAL COMMUNICATION IN ORGANIZATIONS

The forms of organizational communication discussed in the previous section all repre-

sent planned and relatively formal communication mechanisms. However, in many

cases, some of the communication that takes place in an organization transcends these

formal channels and instead follows any of several informal methods. Figure 12.4 illus-

trates numerous examples of informal communication. Common forms of informal

communication in organizations include the grapevine, management by wandering

around, and nonverbal communication.