146-147 COMMUNICATION IN ORGANIZATIONS 2.3 Case Study: I heard it on the grapevine Rumours spreading on a grapevine flourish when people are hungry for information or believe that they are being kept in the dark. Even if you are at school or college this case study is relevant, because all organizations have grapevines. There are questions for you to answer. In any case you could discuss how your grapevine works, what kinds of rumour travel along it, where they come from, what effects they have. Here we present a case of an office grapevine on which there is currently a strong rumour. AN OFFICE IN THE CITY Brian presently works as a clerk in an insurance office in the City of London. He has been there for seven years and intends to stay because the people are friendly, the work is interesting – dealing with different sorts of claims – and the company gives attractive fringe benefits like cheap loans and mortgages. Brian enjoys working in the City with easy access to shops, concerts, plays and art galleries. His office is a short walk from the station so he can get from home to office desk in forty minutes. Since it’s an open-plan office with a relaxed but busy atmosphere there is a good deal of contact between the staff. They talk about the work but they pretty well all talk about their interests outside the office as well. Brian thought there wasn’t much going on that he didn’t know about. So it came as a jolt to hear a rumour that the company was thinking about closing its City office and opening a new office in the west of England. The person who told Brian said that he’d heard it from someone upstairs who said she’d heard it from a cleaner who overheard a phone conversation one evening. The story went round the office like wildfire. When a few of them talked about it in the pub at lunchtime there were mixed reactions. Some of them would love to get away from London to the country and if the company offered the right terms they’d jump at it. Others certainly didn’t want to move and they hoped there was nothing in the story. Arising from this situation, consider the following questions: (a) Is there anything Brian should do after hearing this rumour? (b) Imagine you are the office manager and you hear about the story going round the office. You have been told nothing about any such idea and it bothers you that such a story is circulating. It is certainly affecting your staff at the moment. What action (if any) would you take? (c) Alternatively, imagine you are the office manager in this situation but you have been told confidentially that there is a proposal to move the office out of London. The decision has not been taken yet. What action (if any) would you take? How does our communication change when we are at work? Hint: look back at ideas about context, audience, purpose in chapter 1. Review This is to help you check on the main points of this chapter, ‘Communication in organizations’. 1.1 HOW DO ORGANIZATIONS OPERATE? We made an overview of organizations and listed characteristics which help us to understand how they work: they are created for a purpose, they have structured relationships within them, they set goals, they divide up the work tasks, they co-ordinate the separate parts, they manage resources, they communicate within themselves and with the outside environment. 1.2 RELATIONSHIPS AND STRUCTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS We looked at the formal and official perception of structures. These are often expressed in diagram form as pyramidal or web-shaped. Questions of hierarchy and status arise. Alternatively there can be co-operative equal status. 1.3 NETWORKS OF COMMUNICATION Information flows in several ways and networks are a way of visualizing this. An open access to and exchange of information may be desirable. Or it may be preferable, or more efficient, to restrict the flow.