[Music] hi there i'm dr steve klein from the department of communication at the university of missouri this is the latest in a series of online video lessons intended to provide you important principles and helpful concepts for the study of communication this video is actually the first part of a two-part series taking an introductory look at theories of organizational communication in a previous video in this series we took a more fundamental look at organizational communication asking ourselves just what is an organization anyway we looked at the functions that are served by organizational communication for individual members and for the organization as a whole and we looked at two distinctly different perspectives for how we might examine organizational communication the first a more traditional information-based approach looks at the communication that takes place within organizations how does information effectively get from point a to point b within the organizational entity the second perspective however takes a more complex look at organizations and actually is a constitutive perspective that tries to examine how the organization is actually constructed by communication through the social interactions that take place between the various members of the organization the organization itself actually comes into being is maintained and has the potential for change so with that fundamental foundation done what we want to do now is to start taking a look at the evolution of organizational communication as a sub-discipline of communication studies and this is an evolution that took place through scholarship for the better part of the 20th century so in this video we're going to take a look at two foundational theoretical traditions in this area classical management theories and human relations and human resources theories then in the second video of this series we're going to take a look at two more contemporary perspectives for thinking about or com theory from a systems perspective and from a cultural perspective the first theoretical perspective we're going to take a look at are classical management theories and this theoretical framework uses a prevailing metaphor to understand what organizations are and how they work and that's the metaphor of an organization as a machine if you think about an organization the way that you might think about a machine then the various components of those organizations will be essentially fulfilling the same kinds of functions as the various components of machines especially with regard to specialization standardization and predictability it should come as no surprise that classical management theories for organizations developed around the same time as moving assembly line belt technology for manufacturing at the end of the industrial revolution of course the old urban legend is that henry ford invented the assembly line the processes of assembly line work actually date all the way back to ancient china and for the moving belt assembly line for making ford cars that was invented by a number of ford's employees in 1913 but essentially the process for organizations is the same as for putting together manufactured goods the process is made up of a number of individual parts that are specialized that engage in the same task over and over again the entire process is standardized with each part of the organization essentially being a cog and all of the interlocking gears of the machine the process works the same way over and over and over again so that there's a high level of predictability and any individual specialized part can be switched out for another replacement part if that first part isn't as efficient or functional as it should be indeed this idea that no piece of the machine is absolutely essential and everything can be potentially replaced was pioneered by the first significant theorist in organizational communication frederick taylor who in 1909 developed this idea of the theory of scientific management from the standpoint of this theory efficiency is the key value for all organizations and all employees within that organization if an organization is a machine then you think about that organization's worth to the extent that it's accomplishing the things that it needs to accomplish with the most amount of productive output with the least amount of inefficiencies or resource waste and if employees of an organization are parts of the machine then that's the way you think about these employees and so from this theoretical standpoint sub-optimal elements are replaceable with the big emphasis on efficiency there was a real drive from this perspective for management of organizations to really get involved in micromanaging what specific people did and how they did it because if they were seen as less than optimally efficient they could be switched out for somebody else now around the same time that taylor's developing the theory of scientific management max weber a sociologist from germany is developing a second and very important complementary standpoint and that's the theoretical perspective of bureaucracy according to weber's development of bureaucracy precise rules a division of labor centralized authority and a distinctly defined hierarchy should be driven by rational thought void of emotion and outside influence when you think about bureaucracy the first thing that you probably think of is a bunch of little cubicles in a large inhuman corporate office with lots of papers that are shuffling back and forth from one office to another office from one department to another department and up a food chain from drone employees to middle managers to lower level executives to higher level executives and this idea is essentially what weber had in mind the notion is that if an organization is to operate with optimal efficiency then you need to eliminate redundancy and you have to keep things as organized as possible with a top-down hierarchy that drives the rules and norms for how that organization is going to operate so for instance if you take a look at a sample management organization chart for corporation you might have at the very top of the food chain the chief executive officer of the company underneath the chief executive officer might be four distinct areas within which that organization operates you could have marketing operations financials and technology and so each of these areas is going to have a chief officer chief marketing officer chief operating officer chief financial officer chief technology officer underneath those chiefs are going to be a number of vps or sub offices that require chiefs and then underneath those vice presidents you've got a variety of different sorts of specialized executives and specialized employees doing very specific kinds of work from this kind of organizational structure we have two primary kinds of organization that we think about within the bureaucratic system one is horizontal organization when you think about horizontal organization you're thinking about the various levels of authority that exist within an organization across the various departments or components that it's comprised of so in this case all of the chief officers are horizontally on the same line of authority the various vice presidents are on the same level of authority the various specialists and analysts are on the same level of authority but we've got not just horizontal organization we also have vertical organization within each of these various areas of the organization be it marketing or operations or financials or technology there is a pecking order with the chief officer at the top the various chief department officers directly underneath the chief executive officer followed by middle managers followed by the rest of the employees and so information flow needs to move vertically up the organization and the rules and the authority for how people are supposed to do their jobs moves vertically downward through the organization from the chiefs down to the rest of us now you can see that this means that there's a lot of little cubicles and a lot of little boxes all fulfilling their own specific roles and at the same time it's a very structured and relatively efficient system at least on paper we can see who's in charge of whom we can see who is responsible for doing each job and we can see that there's a real reduction of any kind of redundancy in the organization so for all of the yucky feelings that many of us often have when we hear the words bureaucracy and bureaucrats in some ways bureaucracy is a really helpful way of structuring an organization but as we've already seen this kind of classical management theory along with the scientific theory of management that we get from taylor is one that's really pretty dehumanizing if you look at the organization as a machine and all of the people within it merely parts of that machine we could really end up overlooking some important ways in which that organization is going to rise or fall because remember organizations are social constructs that are made out of people and so this is where the next wave of organizational communication theory is going to start to fill in some important gaps and that's the perspective of human relations and human resources theory these kinds of theories are very different than the classical management traditions from the earlier part of the 20th century in that they see the organization not as an inhuman machine but as people and so the key premises underlying these theories are going to focus on the importance of people in the organization the key premise of this theory comes from mayo and his associates in 1924 who did an influential study looking at an industrial business in the 1920s to try to figure out how it might be that if certain working conditions were improved it might result in better productivity for the factory as a whole now again you can see they're still taking the standpoint of organization as machine and what they're looking at is trying to improve and innovate on some of the specific parts but they found out something very interesting which got called the hawthorne effect named after the location of the factory that the study was taking place and here's what they found they were trying to tweak various ways in which you might be able to improve the needs that specific workers had in the areas that they were working in what they discovered is that simply paying attention to workers and addressing their social needs yielded significant changes in their productivity even if the specific changes didn't necessarily get implemented the mere fact that workers saw that hey we're being studied and examined because the people running this place recognize that things need to change in order for us to have a better quality of life and better working conditions and so that kind of positive attention if you will led to significant improvements in some areas and so what follows from research and theory in this area is that meeting the needs of organizational members or not meeting those needs is going to influence the performance of those organizational members and so from this basic premise comes the idea of human relations theory this kind of theoretical perspective which starts really developing again in the middle part of the 20th century focuses on how organizational members relate to one another and how individuals needs influence their performance in organizations so we start seeing some important moves here we start looking at how members of the organization are connected to one another in social interactions this idea of relating with one another so we really start seeing how human communication is a big part of this the other very important focus here is on the individual's needs and the ways in which these needs were understood were really informed significantly by motivational psychologist abraham maslow who developed in his research in theory what may be familiar to many of you as a hierarchy of needs in this chart which was developed by ovation incentives in a way to apply maslow's theory to an organizational business standpoint human beings have a number of different needs that they need to have fulfilled in order to have well a fulfilling life he redundantly said redundantly we can divide these needs into basic needs and growth needs the basic needs that all humans have are survival i need to have the things that enable me as an organism to live i need food i need potable water i need shelter i need to be able to reproduce and so from the standpoint of organizations this is talking about workers in an organization essentially needing to have money and therefore needing to have the job in order to make that money and the other kinds of things connected to it so that that human being can still continue to keep coming to the job and living and then of course the higher order basic need that follows from that is security so once i have my survival needs met i need to be able to keep them i have to keep this job and i have to keep myself safe at this job so i can continue to get the things i need but once those basic needs are met we can start thinking about the higher order growth needs human beings don't just need after all those basic things we need to survive we need a sense of belonging in other words we need social connections with others these can be co-workers and colleagues at the workplace as well as some kind of recognition from superiors or and or subordinates in the workplace but human beings need to have a sense in which they are connected to others above that we've got importance or esteem needs that we have i want other people to look at me and think that i'm worthwhile and ultimately i want to be able to look at myself and have a sense of self-esteem that i believe that i'm worthwhile myself and that the apex of these motivations is self-actualization which according to the research in this area as you can see from the salvation incentives chart on average less than 15 of all of us really self-report that we get to that level and that's essentially achieving the highest sense of being all we can be as my daughter likes to say living our best lives so thinking about higher order values like justice and freedom and aesthetic beauty and all of these kinds of things so from an organizational standpoint it's essentially being able to get satisfaction in the work itself as work because it just makes you feel better as a person okay so human relations theory focuses on these psychological needs importantly there's still the limitation that the reason that these needs are being met is because ultimately we want people within the organization to be efficient and to be productive so if we meet their needs they're going to do what we want them to do in order to be productive there's also still a very clear sense of hierarchical bureaucracy in these kinds of theories as well the needs of the worker bees if you will are addressed by those that are in positions of authority higher on they're the ones that are establishing the norms and the rules for the organization and so in order to get everybody that's in the organization to do the things that they need to do fulfilling their needs is seen as a way to actually move the lever now when we start shifting from human relations theory to human resources theory we see a little bit of a paradigm shift when this theory starts being developed a little bit later on in the mid 20th century what we see is that employees are recognized as valuable resources that should be fully involved to manifest their abilities and productivity part of what's going on here is some global competition in business organizations that was recognized especially in the 1980s a number of observers in this area looked at the amazing productivity in japanese industrial organizations during the 1980s and tried to ask well why is it that they're having huge successes in areas where u.s companies are really struggling and what they started to see was that some of these other companies in other cultures were approaching the ways in which people actually understood their identity within the context of the larger organization as far more integrated and far more important now while these kinds of japanese style management approaches in the 1980s would evolve and be replaced by things that were a bit more functional in the american context uh during the course of the 1990s to early 2000s the lessons were really important the idea is that if we're going to get the most out of employees employees really need to feel as if they are personally invested in what's going on because everybody's got something to contribute so these kinds of theories really emphasize such innovations as flattened hierarchies where you don't have such a number of different layers of authority over the average person but there is a much greater emphasis on teamwork and collaboration you've got managers working with lower level employees in a way that kind of levels the playing field a bit and in these kinds of theories there's a real big emphasis on employees being involved in decision making the sense is is that if members of an organization feel as if they are the organization they have a stake in how this organization rises or falls as opposed to well i just go there to make a buck and i punch out and i go home and i forget about it those kinds of employees aren't necessarily going to be putting everything they can into the experience but if employees are thinking to themselves this is part of who i am and this is something that's really important we're all in this together and so i have a vested interest in making this organization succeed not only are you going to get better productivity but you're actually going to have better satisfied members of the organization at the same time it's much more of a win-win now what we start seeing from the human resources perspective and this idea that everybody that's a member of the organization has something to contribute is really helpful and makes some contributions to the next perspective we need to think about although there's still a piece of this that's missing and that is what is the relationship of this larger organization to the rest of the contextual environment around it the social and the public scene not to mention other organizations and other individuals and groups interacting with your organization from the outside and with that part one of our introduction to organizational communication theories is at an end please be sure to come back for part two when we're going to take a look at theories that look at orgcom from a systems perspective and from a cultural perspective until then if you've got any questions or concerns about the content of this video or any of the other videos in the series please don't hesitate to reach out and let me know otherwise i'll see you next time [Music] you