What is Organizational Communication?

Updated December 5, 2022 · 1 Min Read

If you are curious about what organizational communication is, or are even considering pursuing a degree in the field, read on for some valuable insight.

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One of the most vital aspects of any business' survival is the efficiency of written and spoken communication among all team members. The manner in which businesses streamline the sending and receiving of internal messages can be formally refereed to as organizational communication. While it isn't an objectively quantifiable metric, many businesses treat organizational communication as a vital constitutive element of their overall efficiency.

Value And Development Of Organizational Communication

A tightly organized channel of communication among business personnel can serve to facilitate stronger relationships among team members. Stronger employee relationships result in better workforce retention, morale and productivity within virtually all sectors that necessitate cooperation.

As businesses are scaled up to the point of demanding more team members to handle all operations, the need for all team members to be on the same page becomes all the more vital. As they grow in size, even businesses that had a relatively strong start early on can be challenged by the risk of wires getting crossed in their internal communications.

To ensure that organizational communication quality can be consistently kept up to par, businesses engage in practices that ideally facilitate a systematically effective flow of accurate information between all interrelated parties.

Organizational Communication In Practice

While organizational communication improvement is highly contextual, there are certain common scenarios in which organization communication proves to be an especially valuable element.

Aside from daily operations, one of the most common scenarios in which tight organizational communication could prove invaluable is when changing industry demands require creativity and adaption to keep up with the competition. When an organizations' consumers and partners begin expecting new things, the infrastructural changes that an organization must enact will be easier to acclimated to with clear communication between everyone on-board.

Origins Of Organizational Development

Organizational communication is deeply rooted in early 20th century business communication analysis. Before organizational communication gained mainstream prominence, the number of professional business writing and speaking specialists was relatively small. Until the 1930s, only a modest handful of professors specialized in matters explicitly concerning the nature of written and spoken business communication.

Eventually, the small number of professors who had taken an interest in business communication were able to develop a steadily growing audience for their publications. It was this early wave of publications on the nature and subtleties of effective business writing and speaking that led to establishment of "organizational communication" as a term.

Some of the most prominent early publications that brought organizational communication into prominence were penned by Herbert A. Simon. In 1947, Simon became one of the first people to write about the importance of formal organization communication systems for better enterprise productivity.

Following the publications that put organizational communication into the spotlight in the 30s and 40s, it grew to become recognized as a valuable business discipline. Over the four decades that followed its initial rise to recognition as a business setting-oriented concept, more began to interpret organizational communication as key constituent of facilitating better organization in virtually all cooperative settings.

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