Real Communication An Introduction

310 Part 3  Group and Organizational Communication

And at the heart of it all is communication. If everyone involved in the system,

from students to professors to principals, keeps to themselves and never voices

concerns or ideas, the system can become closed and collapse under the weight

of its own problems.

Communicating Organizational Culture

The management approaches you learned about in the preceding section can

cause one organization to feel quite different from another. If you were working

in a nineteenth-century factory that valued classical management, you probably

wouldn’t have team birthday parties or picnics the way you might under the

management of the human resources approach, which values individuals. Yet

understanding how different organizations come to have such different atmo-

spheres is more complex than simply understanding their management styles.

We must come to understand organizational culture, an organization’s unique

set of beliefs, values, norms, and ways of doing things (Harris, 2002). Of course,

communication plays a pivotal role in both the shaping and expression of orga-

nizational culture. We’ll explore how in the sections that follow, looking at the

popular Trader Joe’s grocery store chain.

Organizational Storytelling

Do you enjoy food shopping? We often don’t. The lines are long, the store light-

ing is glaring, and there’s always someone who leaves a cart in the middle of the

aisle so that you can’t pass. But if you’re lucky enough to live near a Trader Joe’s,

COLLEGE OR

UNIVERSITY

SYSTEM

Financial Aid

Staff

(members)

Families

High

Schools State

Employers Legislature

City

Relationship Relationship

Students

(members)

Office Staff

(members)

Faculty

(members)

Bursar

(member)

FIGURE 11.1
A COLLEGE OR
UNIVERSITY SYSTEM