USING A COMMUNICATION EXERCISE FOR TRAINING MANAGERS
| Published date | 01 March 1965 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1965.tb00887.x |
| Date | 01 March 1965 |
| Author | P. Hesseling |
USING A COMMUNICATION EXERCISE FOR TRAINING
MANAGERS
P.
HESSELING*
INTRODUCTION
A
MODERN
large-scale industrial organization can be described as a col-
lection of people, many of them specialists, who co-operate in various
spheres and who continuously exchange data and opinions and who arrive
at joint decisions in order to achieve their organization’s objectives. The
central problem of modern large-scale organizations is thus increasingly
that of improving internal communications. This is largely
a
matter of
developing new links between the various departments and specialists
and making the existing ones more effective. In order to take decisions,
managers must spend a considerable amount of time gathering, evaluating
and comparing all the information available from specialists, Every expert,
apart from developing his specialized knowledge and experience, has to
spend more and more time on the ‘translation’ of the information he has to
convey in order to ‘sell’ his contribution convincingly to other managers.
It is
a
commonpIace that managers and, for that matter, bishops, generals
and Civil Servants are almost lost in a flow of paper-work, telephone calls
and meetings.
As
a result of this trend, ‘communication’ itself is frequently discussed
in management journals and training courses. In the books
of
organization
experts, such as those of Drucker, McGregor, Argyris and Likert, problems
of internal communications occupy a central position. Nevertheless, the
existing theory which deals with questions of communication is hardly
advanced to the point of providing guide lines for managers. Descriptive
studies of specific communication patterns are usually of little help since
they are always different in significant respects from the situations faced
in other organizations. Such studies, not surprisingly, often seem quite
irrelevant to practising managers. The most hopeful approach seems to be
to try to develop
a
technique for analysing communication patterns and
for determining their effectiveness.
The problem might be tackled by trying to observe or record the
continuous flow of information between departments or specialists, and
by trying to find correlations between any patterns revealed and produc-
tion
or
personnel performance measurements. Burns’s classic experiment1
Research Officer,
N.
V.
Philips’ Gloeilampenfabrieken, Eindhoven
1
T.
Burns, ‘The Directions
of
Activity and Communication in a Departmental Executive
Group:
A
Quantitative Study in a British Engineering Factory with a Self Recorder Technique’,
Human
Relations
(February
1954),
pp.
13-9
67
To continue reading
Request your trial