Principles of Organizational Behavior, 3rd Edition

21Clarity, Conciseness, and Consistency Are the Keys to Effective Communication

JEAN PHILLIPS, KAMERON M. CARTER, AND DOROTHEA ROUMPI

Pennsylvania State University

Communication is a social behavior that constitutes a vital element of our everyday lives, as it enables us to send and receive information and build and maintain relationships. Within the realm of work, organizations can be viewed as a nexus of communications that occur within and outside their boundaries. Communication is the process of exchanging, conveying, or expressing ideas or information to create a shared understanding and feeling. Effective communication does not require agreement between the sender and the receiver, only the transmission and reception by the receiver of information as it was intended by the sender. Effective communication ultimately happens when the sender's message is efficiently received by the intended audience without misunderstanding.

Because it is how trust, respect, and engagement are built and maintained, effective communication is the glue that holds an organization together (Cho, 2020) and that allows individuals, teams, and business units to work interdependently. For example, although deep-level diversity such as the functional diversity of team members can reduce a team's ability to reach a consensus, research findings suggest that staying task-focused and proactively working together to achieve a shared mental model of decision-making help such teams utilize effective communication ...