A Communication-Rules Approach to Organizational Culture

Maryan S. Schall This paper suggests that organizations, cultures, and cultural can be synthesized as communication phenomena, using a communication-rules perspective. The synthesis is operationalized by an inductive, multifaceted method designed to test the effectiveness of describing an organizational culture through a composite of its operative communication rules. A feasibility study used the method to describe two work groups of a large organization as cultures. Findings from five sources were summarized to create group-culture descriptions that were then submitted to insiders for evaluation. Members of both groups evaluated the descriptions based on their own group's operative communication rules as the most accurate description of their group as culture and more accurate than descriptions based on the formally sanctioned rules espoused by top management.