Chapter 5: Organizational Communication: Definitions & Classical Theories

Learning Objectives

• Identify key theories and theorists from the Classical Perspectives.
• Compare approaches to communication directionality and decision making within key theories.
• Relate the values of early organizational communication theories to current environments.

So far, we’ve looked at how teams are made and the functions of roles, norms, and communication. How does that tie into organizational communication? First, we need to define organizational communication, then look toward the evolution of the term.

Ways of Viewing Organizational Communication

Critical organizational communication scholar Stanley Deetz (2001, p. 4) argues that defining what is meant by the term “organizational communication” is only half the question. “A more interesting question is, ‘What do we see or what are we able to do if we think of organizational communication in one way versus another?’ Unlike a definition, the attempt here is not to get it right but to understand our choices.” Deetz recommends that we attempt to understand the three conceptualizations that are available to “organizational communication” scholars and students: the discipline, ways to describe organizations, and a phenomenon within organizations.

Organizational Communication as a Discipline

The first way the term “organizational communication” is commonly used is as a descriptor referring to a sub-division of the communication field, essentially, an area of study. However, organizational communication is not an academic area of study solely within the field of communication studies. There are courses, books, and degrees all associated with the study of organizational communication. Organizational communication is a “disciplinary matrix” across academic fields because scholars “share a set of paradigmatic assumptions about the study of the phenomenon” and use similar vocabulary to discuss the key issues (Mumby & Stohl, 1996, p. 52). That doesn’t mean all scholars agree about the role or outcomes of organizational communication; disagreement is essential in exercises of critical thinking.

Organizational Communication as a Descriptor

The second way we can view the term “organizational communication” is as descriptor for what happens within organizations. Organizational communication is a hybrid field, which means that people in a variety of different academic areas conduct research on the topic. People in anthropology, business, psychology, sociology, and other academic areas conduct research that is fundamentally about organizational communication. Communication scholars differ in how we approach and describe organizational communication because our training is first, and foremost, in human communication, so we bring a unique history and set of tools to understand what happens within organizations that other scholars do not possess.

Organizational Communication as a Phenomenon

The final way one can view the term “organizational communication” is to view it as a specific phenomenon or set of phenomena that occurs within an organization. For example, when two employees get into a conflict at work, they are enacting organizational communication. When the chief financial officer of an organization is delivering a PowerPoint presentation on the latest quarterly earnings to the organization’s board of directors, they are engaging in organizational communication. The latest advertisement campaign an organization has created for the national media is another example of organizational communication. These are all specific phenomena.

A Conceptual Definition of Organizational Communication

The definition we will use for organizational communication in this book stems primarily out of Deetz’s three views of “organizational communication.” Essentially, organizational communication is the process whereby an organizational stakeholder (or group of stakeholders) attempts to stimulate meaning in the mind of another an organizational stakeholder (or group of stakeholders) through intentional use of verbal, nonverbal, and/or mediated messages. Let’s break this definition down by exploring the key player in this definition, organizational stakeholders.

A stakeholder is any individual or group who has an interest within the organization. Stakeholders of a company include those of the internal environment: employees, customers, managers, board members; as well as external environments: competitors, community members, government agencies, etc. Basically, every organization has a wide range of stakeholders that it must attend to in order to run smoothly, and organizational communication is the meaning-making between these stakeholders.

This definition, however, is built upon a history of study in organizational communication which has undergone several transformations. A good way to understand the history of organizational communication is to look at the emergence of organizational practices, theories and key organizational scholars, which show what was important and prevalent at that time in history. Instead of providing a long, drawn-out history of the field of organizational communication as we know it today, below is a brief timeline dating back to the 1750s when the Industrial Revolution began in the United Kingdom. The introduction of steam-powered machinery forever changed the way businesses operated and led to the eventual creation of the modern corporation. The table below is a summary of the major events in the history of organizational communication. This table is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but only a representative list of some of the major key-moments in the study of organizational communication.

Understanding these important moments in organizational communication history helps us understand how the field transformed over time as a discipline, descriptor and phenomena. In the remainder of this chapter, we’ll examine three different theoretical periods commonly referred to as the classical perspective, human relations, and human resources. Each of these three groupings exist primarily as an opportunity of retrospective analysis. In other words, when we look back over the history of theoretical development in organizational communication, these three periods jump out as being uniquely different, so we ultimately group different ideas and important thought leaders together because of similarities in their theoretical approaches to organizing.

The Classical Perspective

Perhaps, the most widely known theories of organizational communication are those during the classical period that stemmed out of the industrial revolution. The main idea of the classical perspectives of organizational communication is that organizations are similar to machines. Hence, if you have a well- built and well-managed machine, then you will have a very productive and effective organization. The assumption is that each employee is part of a large machine, which is the organization. It one part fails then the entire machine fails. These theories tend to align with a business focus rather than a communication one, yet they to continue to impact how we view organizations and communication in the workplace today. Several key theories emerged during this period:

Fredrick Taylor’s Scientific Management

His ideas originated when most training of workers was based on apprenticeship models. In an apprenticeship, a person would be taught a skill by a more experienced person, through modelling behaviors, where the skilled person does a task, then the inexperienced person tries to model what was done. Taylor believed that this was ineffective because differences in how skilled workers performed could lead to apprentices learning ineffective task processes. Taylor argued that there should be only one way to explain the job and one way to execute the task.

During his time as a foreman for the Bethlehem Steel Works in the 1900s, Taylor observed how workers could do more with less time. He analyzed coal shoveling at the organization, and noticed several workers brought different size shovels from home. Workers who brought small shovels could do more, but it took them longer and workers who brought big shovels could do less, but it was faster. He observed that the best size shovel was one that weighed about twenty pounds. Hence, he ordered the organization to provide all the workers with the same size shovel. He also provided pay incentives for workers who could shovel more coal. By making these changes, the organization was able to increase production drastically.

Overall, Taylor felt that employees were lazy and needed constant supervision. He believed workers engaged in systematic soldiering; when employees decrease their work production based on input or communications from other laborers to create an easier, slower pace. According to Taylor, systematic soldiering happens when employees feel that more production will not result in more compensation. Thus, workers will slow their pace to increase compensation per output, rather than exerting more effort. Because Taylor believed that employees were inherently lazy, he felt that employees also impacted the rate of production.

In order to have a more productive organization, Taylor believed that there were several steps involved:

1. Examine the job or task.
2. Determine the best way to complete the job or task.
3. Choose the most appropriate person for the task.
4. Train the person to do the task efficiently.

Taylor believed that by using these scientific steps, organizations would have fewer misuses of human effort. He created a series of time and motion studies and became widely known for his approach.

Time and motion referred to a method for calculating production efficiency by recording outcomes and the time needed to produce those outcomes. A researcher could determine how long a worker needs to lay a row of bricks by measuring workers’ movements over time creating a benchmark for production. Then, by designing each task in the brick-laying process to be clear-cut and simple and teaching each worker to do it the same way, they could predict how many brick rows a worker could produce each day. This clearly shows the machine metaphor at work, with no flexibility, creativity, or originality allowance for workers doing the tasks, no need for management to interact or build rapport with workers, and only top-down communication from management, whose job it is to study and think of more efficient practices. Workers do not provide input, they just need to know how to perform the task.

Taylor’s ideas on time and motion were furthered by the research of Frank Gilbreth (1957) who filmed workers in action to gain a better idea of physical movements. In the following video, Frank and his wife Lilian studied brick workers using time and motion study techniques.

In this video, the original configuration of the scaffolding required a lot of bending motion on the part of the bricklayers. The bending motion not only took more time but also increase fatigue of the workers over a long day, which would make them less effective and productive. After completing the time and motion study, you see the second half of the video where the workers have created scaffolding for the bricks that does not involve bending over to pick up the bricks. Ultimately, this simple example clearly illustrates the impact that time and motion study techniques could have on making conditions for workers better.

At the same time, some opposed Taylor’s approach to productivity. As early as 1912, the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations was raising skepticism about scientific management or what many were just calling Taylorism. He was also referred to as “the enemy of the working man” by labor unions (Morgan, 1986). Why do you think that is? Do you use any aspects of his approach in your own life? Make a list of pros and cons of Taylorism in your end of chapter notes.

Fayol’s Classical Management

Around the same time of Taylor’s scientific management theory, Henri Fayol, the director of a French mining company, developed his theory of “administrative science” also known as classical management. His approach became popular in the United States in the late 1940s. Fayol believed there were five elements essential for management to do within an organization:

1. Planning: managers create plans for the organization and predict future organizational needs
2. Organizing: organizations employ people and materials to complete their plans
3. Commanding: what managers do to get the optimal output in production and efficiency
4. Coordinating: managers bring together the labors of its employees
5. Controlling: determining the accuracy of the organization’s efforts and its plan

He also had clear ideas on how organizations and managers should do this work. These included:

• Unity of Direction: The organization should have the same objectives, one plan/goal, and one person of leadership authority
• Unity of Command: Each employee should have one boss and receive instructions from only one person in a vertical chain of command and be accountable for just one plan (this is known as the scalar principle.) Fayol advocated for the division of labor using departmentalizing leading to a classical hierarchical pyramid organizational structure.
• Authority: Decision-making should be centralized, and workers should respect authority figures. This is because authority arises not only from a person’s position in the company, but also their moral character. Managers should have both and as such workers should obey. No other individuals in the organization have the privilege of power.
• Order: The organization must have set places for workers and resources. These should be in the right place at the correct time. Fayol advocated for fair wages for fair effort and believed that organizations could avoid high turnover rates if they paid employees stable wages.
• Subordination of Individual Interest to the General Interest: The interest of the organization is most significant and not those of the group or individuals working for the organization. Fayol believed supervisors should work hard to build employee morale and help them rally behind organizational interests.

Fayol’s principles of management are similar to the military because there is unity in direction, unity in command, subordination of individual interests to the general interest, and order. Even though Fayol’s principles may appear to be strict, by noting that it is the morality of the manager that leads to worker respect rather than the manager’s position of power, Fayol was one of the first theorists to grasp the idea that having unconditional compliance with an organization may lead to problems.

All in all, communication in this perspective has two functions: control and command. Fayol believes that organizations must limit their communication to precise and explicit words for task design and implementation. Thus, communication is not spontaneous and is more centralized in a classical organization. Fayol’s impact still has a big influence on many of today’s organizations’ climate, structure, and leadership. Where do you see his ideas at work?

Weber’s Bureaucracy

To understand the final approach in the Classical perspective, it is important to define particularism. As the industrial revolution took hold of corporations, working conditions became harsher, children were sent to work long hours in factories, and workers could be hired or fired for a myriad of reasons including sex, race, religion, attitude, relationship to managers, etc. This way of maintaining a workforce was known as particularism, because demographics played a large role in employment and what type of jobs were available. This created an ideological conflict in the United States, which was founded on the democratic principles of equality, yet children and those in BIPOC communities were often forced to accept menial or dangerous jobs with long hours and low pay. They were not promoted to positions of power.

From this ideological conflict rose the idea of system bureaucracy, which was promoted by social philosopher Max Weber. He hoped bureaucracy, or organizational ideals of rules and impersonality, would protect workers by promoting and hiring manager level workers based on criterion and standards rather than popularity or family relations, and providing rules for hiring, firing, and promotional practices. He believed in universalism, which aimed to create standards of fair treatment for workers.

He argued that bureaucratic organizations should have the following characteristics:

Specialization & Division of Labor

Specific set tasks allow employees to achieve its own objective. Thus, every worker did not have to do many jobs, but an exclusive task that was assigned to that worker. This helped to alleviate multiple trainings and increase production.

Rules & Procedures

Written policies help manage and direct the organization. Managers spend a majority of their time on how these policies help to guide and function in the organization. These procedures would serve as a guide and resource for the organization.

Hierarchy of Authority

Organizations need to have a chain of command that is shaped like a pyramid. There are levels of supervisors and employees. Each worker will answer to their corresponding manager/supervisor. This would assist in having a direct line of communication and better efficiency in the organization.

Formal Communication

All decisions, rules, regulations, and behaviors are recorded. This information and communication will be shared in terms of the chain of command. Hence, everything is documented and accounted. There is no question in what needs to be done, because it is written down.

Detailed Job Descriptions

The organization has clear and concise definitions, directions, and responsibilities of each position. Each worker is aware of their task and how to employ.

Employment Based on Expertise

The organization will assign workers in positions that would fit their competencies. Hence, workers will be placed in the organization where they can maximize production.

Impersonal Environment

Relationships need to be impersonal and separate so that workers’ personal thoughts or feelings would not affect bias or decisions. Workers just need to work, and they do not need to interact with others. Interpersonal relationships may jeopardize the organization’s outcomes.

Even though many people associate bureaucracy with red tape and ineffective organizations, this is not the outcome of bureaucracy. According to Weber, bureaucracy should be synonymous with order, consistency, reason, and reliability, protecting workers. Do you think this is true? What is the role of communication in bureaucracy?

Human Relations

As these classical theories evolved, the world too began to change. Two major events in the 1930s and 1940s, including the Great Depression and World War II, led to several new ways of understanding the phenomena of organizational communication. After the Dust Bowl, when farming states were unable to produce profitable crops, workers flooded into cities. The influx of workers meant jobs were difficult to find, wages were low, hours were long, safety was an afterthought, and complaining about working conditions meant losing your job. Yet, labor unions also emerged fighting for fair working conditions. World War II shifted the workforce again as the military and private sector led to massive leaps in job expansion. Collaborations between researchers, the military, and organizations also led to new ideas about organizational communication and the social needs of workers. While classical theories minimized communication as a way to transmit information down the hierarchical chain, the next wave of theories saw communication as essential for meeting the needs of workers.

The human relations management theory is a researched belief that people desire to be part of a supportive team that facilitates development and growth. Therefore, if employees receive special attention and are encouraged to participate, they perceive their work has significance, and they are motivated to be more productive, resulting in high quality work. Business professor Raymond E. Miles (1965) called human relations a knee-jerk reaction to Fredrick Taylor’s scientific management. Where Taylor viewed people as parts of a working machine, the human relations approach shifted the viewpoint from the task to the worker. For the first time, workers were viewed as an important part of the organization that should be viewed holistically instead of bundles of skills and aptitudes. Workers felt like they belonged to something bigger than themselves, and thus the worker’s work was important to the overall effort of the organization.

For communication scholars, the human relations approach is important because it is the first time that two-way communication was encouraged. Two-way communication works as a dialogue between workers and managers, rather than unidirectional communication from the manager targeted at the worker. Furthermore, the human relations perspective sees communication as a tool that can be used by management to “buy” cooperation from workers. Because employees are more productive when they are satisfied, it becomes the job of the manager to openly engage with workers they oversee. As Miles (1965) notes it might make more sense to “waste time” talking through problems with workers and perhaps even implement their suggestions, even if they may not seem as efficient, as a way to create buy in for decisions.

Key People in Human Relations:

Elton Mayo was a Harvard Professor who had a huge interest in Federick Taylor’s work and productivity. In 1924, Elton Mayo and his protégé Fritz Roethlisberger were awarded a grant by the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy of Science to study productivity and lighting at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company. The Hawthorne experiments, as Elton Mayo’s body of work became known as, are a series of experiments in human relations conducted between 1924 and 1932 at Western Electric Company's Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois.

Learn more about the studies here:

https://youtu.be/8KY1RV0CBoE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAcGFV3pk3U

The Hawthorne Studies reinvented how organizations think about and manager workers. Unlike Taylor’s perspective, Mayo and Roethlisberger felt that interpersonal relationships were important. Moreover, they felt that society was composed on groups and not just individuals, individuals do not act independently with their own interests but are influenced by others, and most workers decisions are more emotional than rational.

Overall, these studies demonstrated the importance that communication is in worker-supervisor interactions, the importance of peer-relationships, and the importance of informal organizations. While the Hawthorne Studies revolutionized management theory, they were also quite problematic. For example, most of the major studies in this series consisted of very small samples of workers (6 in the relay study; 13 in the bank wiring study), so these results are suspect from a scientific vantage point. Furthermore, some would argue that Hawthorn effects were really the result of workers who were more afraid of unemployment rather than communication relationships (Rice, 1982). Regardless of potential errors of the studies, the conclusion that Mayo, Roethlisberger, and Dickson found was quite extraordinary. Relationships have a significant impact on the quality of organizational performance.

What role do you feel interpersonal communication and interpersonal relationships have in the workplace? What is useful about these ideas? What is problematic?

Human Resources

While Human Relations focuses on the interpersonal relationships within an organization, the Human Resources approach views workers as reservoirs of untapped resources of skills, energy, creativity, and the capacity for “responsible, self-directed, self-controlled behavior” (Miles, 1965, 152). Under this perspective, managers should not be focused on controlling employees or getting them to “buy-in” to decisions, which are the hallmarks of scientific management and human relations. Instead, the primary task of management should be the creation of a working environment that fosters employee creativity and risk taking in an effort to maximize and tap into the resources employees bring to the job. As such, communication in this perspective must be constant and bi-directional and participation in decision-making must include both management and workers.

The following table outlines key differences between the Human Relations and Human Resource approaches.

Source: This table is based on Mile’s models of participate leadership. Miles, R. E. (1965). Human relations or human resources? Harvard Business Review, 43(4), 148–157, pg. 151.

As we see in the table, there some key differences between human relations and human resources theories. These differences can be broken down into two basic categories: motivation and decision making. The rest of this section focuses on these areas and the key people who researched these phenomena.

Motivation Theories:

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Abraham Maslow (1943) is widely known for his creation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Model that suggests there are certain levels of human motivation and each level must be met before moving to the next level. Shaped like a pyramid, the model shows that human’s most basic need from lowest to highest is physical, then safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Maslow tried to understand what motivates people to work and concluded that needs vary among workers. Managers must understand the motivations of their employees to help them improve their work.

• Psychological: The first level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is psychological, which means that physical needs such as food and water need to be met first. If workers do not make enough money to buy food and water, then it will be hard for them to continue working.
• Safety Needs. The second level is called safety. Workers need to be in a safe environment and know that their bodies and belongings will be protected. If workers don’t feel secure, then they will find it hard to work efficiently. Think of the many occupations that are highly unsafe and how that would impact other needs. According to Forbes (2023) the top ten most dangerous jobs in the U.S. are:

1. Logger
2. Fisherman
3. Roofer
4. Airplane Pilot
5. Iron/Steel Workers
6. Truck Driver/Deliveryman
7. Trash/Recyclable Collectors
8. Underground Mining Machine Operators
9. Construction Workers
10. Electrical Power Line Workers

• Love, Affection, and Belongingness Needs. The third layer is called love, affection, and belongingness needs. Maslow believed that if an individual met the basic physiological and safety needs, then that individual would start attempting to achieve love, affection, and belongingness needs next. Maslow believed that organizations would have better worker retention and satisfaction if they kept their employees in a cohesive environment. Furthermore, if a worker feels isolated or ostracized from their environment, then he or she would feel less motivated to work, which will lead to a decrease in overall productivity.
• Esteem Needs. The fourth layer is called esteem and is represented by two different sets of needs according to Maslow. First, individuals are motivated by the “desire for strength, for achievement, for adequacy, for confidence in the face of the world, and for independence and freedom” (Maslow, 1943, 381). Maslow goes on to discuss a second subset of esteem needs, “the desire for reputation or prestige (defining it as respect or esteem from other people), recognition, attention, importance or appreciation” (pp. 381-382). While Maslow originally separated these two lists from each other, they clearly have more in common than not. If employees do not feel that their input is valued at the organization, they will seek out other places of employment that will value their input, because humans have an intrinsic need to be appreciated for their efforts.
• Self-Actualization Needs. The fifth layer is called self-actualization, and it is the hardest to attain. Self-actualization “refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for [a person] to become actualized in what [they are] potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.” Maslow goes on to explain, “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if [they are] to be ultimately happy” (p.382). Maslow felt that if individuals can have their needs met in order of the layers, then they would be both motivated and seek opportunities to excel.

All in all, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs helps us understand how to motivate workers to strive for more in the organization. Hence, communication is very important, because we need to understand what our employees need to motivate them to work more proficiently and productively.

Frederick Herzberg’s Motivation-Hygiene Theory

Another researcher to enter the fray of human motivation was Frederick Herzberg. Originally trained as a clinical psychologist, he became one of the first researchers in the growing field of industrial psychology. He extended beyond Maslow’s ideas of workplace motivation, seeking to understand what motivated workers to have positive or negative job attitudes.

Herzberg and his original colleagues (1959) theorized that what ultimately motivated individuals to work were not necessarily the same factors that led to demotivation at work. Instead, he predicted that the factors that lead to positive job attitudes (and thus motivation) were different from the factors that lead to negative job attitudes (and thus demotivation). For the purposes of his theory, he called the factors that led to positive job attitudes motivators and those factors that led to negative job attitudes hygiene factors.

Notice that the motivators are all centered around ideas that are somewhat similar to the esteem needs and self-actualization needs of Abraham Maslow. On the other hand, the hygiene factors all examine the context of work. You may also notice that salary falls under both motivators and hygiene factors. In later works, Herzberg (1976) reversed his previous thinking that salary was purely a hygiene factor noting salary can also reflect recognitions of achievement.

Decision Making Theories

Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y

As discussed earlier, the classical perspective argued that leadership should control and order workers while the human relations approach believed managers need to cultivate and support their employees. These two perspectives emerged as two sides of a coin within Douglas McGregor’s (1960) Theory X and Theory Y of management. This theory attempts to explain assumptions managers have about their workers and how that affects organizational communication patterns.

Theory X is similar to the scientific management approach, where workers are expected to only work. In this perspective, managers believe that workers are apathetic towards work and need direction. In addition, managers believe that workers are not smart, do not seek advancement, and avoid responsibility. The only way to get them to adequately work is with promises of rewards or punishments. Theory Y aligns with the human relations approach. In this perspective, managers believe that people want to succeed and do what is best for the organization. They can excel if given the right to be creative under the right conditions. In addition, people want to work, seek direction, and are ambitious. These theories were based on assumptions that managers have about their workers.

McGregor offers this contrasting viewpoint to highlight the need to incorporate individual’s desires into organizational planning and structure. He argues the “essential task of management is to arrange things, so people achieve their own goals by accomplishing those of the organization” (cited in Perrow, 1986, p. 99). This brings forth the ideas of employee integration in decision-making and self-direction.

Rensis Likert’s Participative Decision Making Theory

Exploring employee decision-making participation around the same time as McGregor was Rensis Likert. He believed organizations should support employees’ feelings of self-worth and build supportive relationships and open communication within and between groups in the organization. Likert believed managers who treated employees as humans rather than workers and included them in decision making, created environments with stronger worker productivity.

Out of this basic understanding of productive versus unproductive management, Likert created Participative Decision Making (PDM) theory which introduced a series of four distinct management styles (which he refers to as “systems”) based on the level of participation afforded to workers.

System 1: Exploitive Authoritative: Managers do not trust workers and do not have confidence in their decision-making capabilities. Thus, management makes decisions which are imposed on the workers. Communication is unidirectional from management to workers and employees are motivated to comply due to fear.

System 2: Benevolent Authoritative: Managers feel they should have the sole right to make decisions, and workers will comply because of the manager’s legitimate right to make decisions. Workers are not free to discuss decisions or job-related matters with their superiors because of this positionality. Motivation for compliance is typically rewards based.

System 3: Consultative. System 3: There is some trust in employee decision making capabilities; however, the manager still retains autonomous control of the final decisions. Typically, managers seek worker input, then use that input to make the final decision. Workers tend to feel these environments are more “fair” and are more motivated and satisfied, however, beware of pseudo-consultative practices where input is sought, but not used in the decision-making process. This is a different form of benevolent authoritative management.

System 4: Participative: The goal is to ensure decision-making and goal attainment are spread throughout the organizational hierarchy. Workers are encouraged to be active in decision-making processes. Communication is multi-directional, and employees are both motivated and satisfied.

Which of these best demonstrates your own working environment? Does it have to be that way?

As you review the theories which emerged during the Classical Perspective, Human Relations, and Human Resources Approaches, how do you think the time in which they emerged impacted their values? What refinements would you suggest given today’s culture and workplace preferences?

Key Takeaways & Summary

Now that you’ve read the chapter, write a summative conclusion with your key takeaways. What information do you want to remember? How does it all tie together, and why does this information matter? You will thank yourself when it’s time for the exam.

Authors & Attribution

The content in this chapter was remixed, adapted and/or authored by Seroka, L. (2025) from:

• Chapter 3: Classical Theories of Organizational Communication, found within Organizational Communication – Theory, Research, and Practice by Anonymous on LibreTexts licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license
• Chapter 1: Introducing Organizational Communication, found within Organizational Communication by Julie Zink on University System of New Hampshire Pressbooks licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License
• Chapter 3: Scientific Management, Bureaucracy, and the Emergence of the Modern Organization, found within Organizational Communication by Julie Zink on University System of New Hampshire Pressbooks licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License
• Chapter 4: The Human Relations School, found within Organizational Communication by Julie Zink on University System of New Hampshire Pressbooks licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License

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