What Is Organizational Communication?

Organizational Communication

Chapter Objectives:

After reading this chapter you should be able to:

• Define organizations and organizational communication.
• Explain how the study of organizational communication developed.
• Explain the five theoretical perspectives for understanding organizational communication.
• Understand the challenges to organizational communication.
• Explain the future directions of organizational communication.

If you have ever worked a part-time job during the school year, worked a full-time summer job, volunteered for a non-profit, or belonged to a social organization, you have experienced organizational communication. It's likely that you've been a job seeker, an interviewee, a new employee, a co-worker, or maybe a manager? In each of these situations, you make various choices regarding how you choose to communicate with others in an organizational context.

We participate in organizations in almost every aspect of our lives. In fact, you will spend the bulk of your waking life in the context of organizations. Think about it, that means you'll spend more waking time with your co-workers than your family! At the center of every organization is what we've been studying throughout this book – Communication. Organizational communication is a broad and ever-growing specialization in the field of Communication. For the purpose of this chapter, we will provide a brief overview of the field, highlighting what organizational communication is and how it is studied.

Source: Laura K. Hahn, Scott T. Paynton, https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Survey – of – Communication – Study
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.