ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION

Organizations rely on globally-distributed work groups to bring together employees from around the world. Rather than search for individuals who live near each other to complete a project, companies identify people with the needed skills and knowledge, no matter where they live and connect them via the internet, cell phones, and other new communication technologies (Baba, Gluesing, Ratner, & Wagner, 2004). Entrepreneurs form online groups to brainstorm, exchange ideas, and develop marketing strategies. Using email, videoconferencing, and instant messaging, these innovators launch new successful businesses (Matlay & Westhead, 2005).

You probably associate new communication technologies with the internet, iphone, iPad and similar digital media. But the printing press, telegraph, and telephone were all new communication technologies in our late time. What's different this time?

The printing press allowed the mass distribution of information from one person or party, such as a newspaper publisher, to many people. With the telegraph, people for the first time could send brief messages almost instantaneously across long distances. The telephone provided voice transmission and a person-to-person connection from people's homes and businesses. The internet gave individuals a wide variety of ways to communicate and share information, but initially still left them tied to wire and specific locations. However, with WiFi (wireless fidelity) enabled laptops, iphones, and similar devices, you can access the internet from an increasing number of locations.

At the beginning of the 21st century, you can communicate nearly anywhere at anytime to anyone. You live in a pervasive communication environment that gives you multiple access points to an integrated communication structure with text, audio, video, and voice capabilities (Coopman, 2009). So what does this mean? Much more than chatting with your friend in Japan while you are stuck in KL traffic. A pervasive communication environment gives communicators the ability to access, create, and share information in multimedia from almost anywhere, at anytime, for any reason. The social impacts of such a development are staggering. And I'm not just talking about online shopping and getting friends together for happy hour. Mobile devices connected to the internet played important roles in organizing political protests that toppled governments.

The pervasive communication environment in which you live influences all these aspects of group and team communication. Location specific media, especially telephones and desktop computers, allow group members to interact with each other without being in the same physical space. Although group and team members often rely on analog media such as paper magazines, newspapers, and books for their research, new communication technologies have greatly increased the ease of identifying relevant materials within these media. In addition, print and radio become multi-directional when combined with new media devices such as complex mobile or cell technologies, WiFi-enabled portable computers, and digital recording devices. These mobile technologies link into a larger and increasingly more integrated communication infrastructure broadly construed as the internet. This digital infrastructure brings together older media forms, both mobile and location specific, into a larger pervasive communication environment. Of course, at the model's center is the fundamental interaction and production of human interaction. All these elements combine in an interactive dance with each part of the communication structure linked in a multitude of ways with every other part.

This pervasive communication environment has changed how group and team members communicate in fundamental ways. Many groups still meet at least a few times face-to-face. But they also use email, net meeting, chat, text messaging, instant messaging, and other media to exchange ideas, solve problems, and make decisions. With the internet linking technologies and people together, time and place no longer constrain a group's activities.

If team members meet online, such as via email, chat, or discussion board, does that mean the communication isn't real? Initial distinctions between realand virtual have subsided as scholars develop a better understanding of how groups and teams use new media. Early research on computer-mediated communication (CMC) and teamwork focused on differences between CMC and face-to-face groups. More recent research recognizes that most groups use a mix of communication tools—phone, email, text-messaging, instant messaging, net meeting, face-to-face. Rarely do team members communicate using a single method, such as only email or only face-to-face.

Calling face-to-face real and all other communication virtual presents a problem. If you instant message (IM) a friend, isn't that real communication? When you email a family member, do you think of your message as not real? How about phone conversations. Are they real or virtual? For this class, we meet online—is it real? When practically every device from a telephone to a baby monitor has a computer in it, even the idea of computer mediated communication seems a little antiquated. These situations highlight just a few of the problems with the real-virtual distinction.

Recent research found that teens use IM to begin, maintain, and end romantic relationships (Lenhart, Madden, & Hitlin, 2005). These relationships—and the feelings that go along with them—are quite real. Categorizing IMing, emailing, podcasting, blogging, and the like as virtual suggests that these communication forms lack substance, impact, and meaning. Yet these messages produce actual effects. When you start thinking about what you do with various communication technologies rather than what they are, you're better able to use them in the best ways for group and team communication.