An Attribute Space for Organizational Communication Channels

The primary objective of this study was to identify the perceptual dimensions used by 158 managers and their professional staff at a single large manufacturing firm in differentiating fourteen distinct communication channels available in the firm. Six candidate criteria for differentiating these channels were examined (channel accessibility, information quality, immediate feedback, cue variety, personalization, and receiver accessibility) using multidimensional scaling. A secondary objective involved assessing whether communication direction influenced perceptions. Responses were obtained for two intraorganizational communication directions: lateral and downward. Results indicated that these individuals applied a perceptual framework involving three dimensions: information feedback, accessibility, and quality. Further, a perspective shift from the “message sender” to the “message receiver” was observed in moving from lateral to downward communication. The observations of directional differences demonstrate the inappropriateness of either ignoring communication direction in research designs and of directly transferring research models and instruments that pertain to one communication direction to another direction. Taken together, these results may prove helpful in developing a richer theoretical basis for exploring task/media relationships, which in turn may lead to future research findings providing recommendations for improving individual and organizational performance.