Organizational Management Guide : Communication Structure

In this installment of our guide to organizational management we look at organizational communications…

The standard patterns of communications are chain, wheel, star, and all-channel, each of which can influence the speed with which decisions are made, their accuracy, and ensuring that the key stakeholders have a satisfactory outcome based on the decision.

Representing the chain type of communications would be a hierarchy, and a good example can be found in the top-down communication structure of the military – a very formal example. Wheel type communications are generally those found within an autocratic (one-man rule) organization and seeks little or no input from others.

The star is similar to the basic formal structure of many organizations, whereby people within a group communicate (information flowing in both directions) with a few other people in the group but not all of them. The all-channel network is analogous to the free-flow of communication in a group that encourages all of its members to become involved in group decision processes.

It’s thought that in patterns with positions located centrally (such as the wheel and the star), an organization quickly develops around the people occupying these central positions. In such patterns, the organization is more stable and errors in performance are lower than in patterns having a lower degree of centrality, such as the all-channel. However, the morale of members in high centrality patterns is relatively low and this could, in the long run, lower the accuracy and speed of such networks.

A group’s morale can be greatly improved where communications are divided more uniformly across the board. Networks that employ such methods of communication take advantage of the experience, knowledge and skills of more people, allowing for a wider range of possibility than those entities that allow decisions to be made by those in a higher, more central capacity.

Which pattern is best for a particular organization is dependent on it’s size, the speed and accuracy at which it must reach decisions, and it’s room for error in judgment. However, the fact that the majority of organizations operate using the star pattern indicates that, in practice, it returns the best all-round results.