The Power of Informal Communication by Michael Wood
Just imagine: You've been working on a new change strategy aimed at transforming the processes and efficiency of your business. You've invested considerable time and effort researching world class approaches, consulted with experts and specialists in your field, and finally arrived at a new structure that will provide you with a more competitive and streamlined organisation. You've formulated a communication plan that you hope will share your vision with your team and engage them in the changes. You've spent hours constructing an email announcement tirelessly going over the details, tone, pitch, length, and so on. You finally send the email out confident that your team will get on board. You wait enthusiastically in your office for your positive response.
After some time waiting you decide to take a walk to the drinks machine and check out what's happening for yourself. You wander down the corridor and in the distance you see some of your team chatting. As you get closer you're astonished to see what looks like disappointed faces. With their hunched shoulders they shake their heads and discuss the email that you sent. You can't believe it. Why on earth are they upset? Where's their commitment? These changes are positive!
Does this sound familiar? Ever been in this situation where you've invested time and effort into a communication plan that doesn't achieve the response you presumed you would get? A positively intended message that resulted in confusion, uncertainty, and misunderstanding?
Two of the factors at play in this example, and many others like it, are selecting an inappropriate medium of communication and underestimating the effects of social influence. In a world where 80-90% of people's attention is concerned with informal, sub-conscious behaviours, why do organisations invest the majority of their time on formal communication?
Informal communication
Informal communication is truly interactive, enabling us to respond, react, elaborate or modify in order to deal with objections and misunderstandings (e.g., Kraut, Lewis, & Swezey, 1982). Informal communication is rich in content, and according to Daft and Lengel (1986), rich communication channels are ones that "can overcome different frames of reference or clarify ambiguous issues to change understanding in a timely manner" (p. 560). In terms of comparisons, face-to-face communication is considered increasingly richer than telephone communication, which is thought to be richer than personal documents such as letters, then impersonal documents, and finally numerical documents.
When conflicts arise and disagreements need to be worked out, research shows that organisational members prefer an interactive and rich medium, such as face-to-face meetings (Daft and Lengel, 1986). And Argote (1982) has shown that when groups who are less certain about what they need to achieve do engage in more ad hoc or unplanned communication, like a quick catch up or coffee table conversation, they are more successful in performing their work than if they rely on other formal procedures.
Studies in social psychology suggest that relatively unstructured and informal communication is at the basis of social processes, such as person perception and liking, which underlie group maintenance and member support (e.g., Festinger, Schacter, & Back, 1950; Zajonc, 1968). To give one example, Gabarro (1987) describes the development of mutual expectations and trust that sustains the work relationships among managers; when a CEO no longer trusts the judgments of his or her subordinates, the subordinate is frequently transferred, demoted or fired. "Mutual expectations are typically worked out over time during a succession of routine interactions, such as ad hoc encounters, meetings, progress reviews, and discussions of task-based problems" (p. 184).
Frequency as a measure of importance
If we use the frequency with which informal communication occurs as a measure of importance, then numerous studies have shown that informal communication is vitally important in organisations. For example, Sproull (1984) reviewed the evidence from seven studies of managerial communication, where managers in these studies ranged from mid-level rank (e.g., factory heads and school principals) to those at the most senior level (e.g., CEOs of moderate-sized corporations and college presidents). Data collection included both direct observations of the managers by researchers who shadowed them during their work day and managers' self-reports of communication in daily diaries. Across the seven studies, verbal interaction (e.g., unscheduled face-to-face conversations and telephone calls) accounted for about three-quarters of managers' work days.
More recently, Kraut and colleagues (2002) studied the distribution of conversations in three different Research & Development Organisations and identified that 12% of the conversations were scheduled, 36% were intended, 21% were opportunistic, and 31% were spontaneous. Assuming that only scheduled meetings are formal, then by this definition 88% of the conversations sampled were unscheduled and informal. They also found that scheduled meetings were substantially longer than other types of conversations with the average length being about 30 minutes, whilst unscheduled meetings tended to last less than a third of this time, each with an average of less than 10 minutes.
In terms of productivity, unscheduled meetings were found to be as valuable as scheduled ones for getting tasks accomplished; they occur four times as frequently, yet take only a third as much time to accomplish. Further, brief hallway encounters were as valuable as hour-long scheduled meetings in terms of getting to know co-workers and maintaining working relationships with them. In summary, if one simultaneously considers the value of different types of conversations, the frequency with which they occur, and their duration, it is clear that much important work occurs in informal unscheduled meetings.
Conforming to peer influence
Social psychological research into conformity also has a bearing on how a communication like an announcement, speech, or presentation would be filtered and understood. Traditionally, in North America (e.g., Asch, 1956), it was believed that conformity reflected a relatively rational process in which people constructed a norm from other people's behaviour in order to determine correct and appropriate behaviour for themselves.
Soloman Asch created an experiment where groups of 7-9 participants were asked to discriminate between the length of lines presented on a piece of paper. In reality, only one participant was a true and naïve participant, the others were undercover researchers instructed to give erroneous responses. The results showed that these erroneous responses could influence participants to conform to the erroneous majority. He argued that this suggested that individuals conform to avoid censure, ridicule and social disapproval.
Later, in a revision of his original experiment, Asch had 16 naïve participants facing one undercover researcher offering erroneous responses. On this occasion the participants did not conform to the erroneous answers and openly ridiculed and laughed at his responses. Asch surmised that, in this instance, the participants were not worried about social disapproval, as there was no social pressure to conform to.
In 1955, social psychologists Deutsch and Gerrard argued that two processes of social influence were responsible for conformity: informational influence and normative influence. Informational influence is an influence to accept information from another as evidence about reality. Normative influence is an influence to conform to the positive expectations of others. The latter being the principal cause of conformity in the Asch paradigm.
Going back to the example in the beginning, for instance, if you had communicated the expected changes face-to-face to your team having already sought the support from your closer more immediate direct reports, would this influence other people's response?
Deutsch and Gerrard argued that the majority is often in control of rewards, such as social acceptance and material benefits, and might exert influence for this reason. Further, in 1991, Mugny and Perez purported that people might be motivated to identify with or see themselves as similar to the majority because identification with the majority offers the perception of greater status or greater power.
Minority Influence
In contrast to the majority perspective, in Europe (e.g. Moscovici, 1969) it was thought possible that minorities can change the attitudes of the majority. Romanian born Jewish-French Psychologist Serge Moscovici and colleague believed that Asch's lone participant can be seen as a member of the majority i.e. those people outside the experiment who would agree with their judgment, confronted by a minority i.e. the undercover researcher.
He believed that consistency was a key behavioural style that the minority needs to adopt to win over the majority. This was demonstrated in 'blue-green' studies, whereby 4 participants were confronted by 2 undercover researchers in a colour perception task involving varying shades of blue. The undercover researchers were either consistent i.e. always calling slides green or inconsistent i.e. calling slides green and blue. The results show that the consistent minority had significantly more influence than the inconsistent minority.
Later, in 1980, he supplemented his earlier work with a dual-process model that suggested there was a differentiation between conformity and conversion and argued that majorities and minorities exert influence through different processes. Conformity was described as public, temporary, and superficial, whereas conversion was defined as private and internalised attitude change that persists beyond the influencing context.
This brings in a further dynamic to getting people on board with your changes. You may well have sought the support from your direct reports, who may well have influenced the other team members to agree and nod accordingly to your vision and strategy (the conformity that Moscovici was talking about). But what happens later when everyone walks away from the meeting and considers in private their own thoughts and feelings? This is the conversion that Moscovici described.
He argued that public compliance with the majority may have little impact on a person's true attitude. True change is more likely to occur when people are confronted with a discrepant message from a minority. In this situation, people consider the message advocated by the minority, try to understand what the minority is saying and why. This message processing can lead to conversion to the minority position, rather than simple compliance.
Does this sound familiar?
So, would you still be surprised at the response to your email announcement? On the one hand, the announcement may well have been constructed perfectly, but unless there is an opportunity to interact, respond, and deal with objections and misunderstanding, dotting and 'i's and crossing the 't's is not enough. And having discussed face-to-face your plans, made yourself available for ad hoc conversations and opportunistic meetings to clarify your intentions, further awareness and appreciation of the on-going effects of social influence is needed to help eliminate the uncertainty, confusion, and misunderstanding associated with communicating change.
Discuss and Debate
For further discussion and debate on effective communication strategies and how to harness informal channels please get in touch with us at Noggin. Email: daryll@mynoggin.co.uk
References
Argote, L. (1982). Input uncertainty and organizational coordination in hospital emergency units. Administrative Science Quarterly, 27, 420-434.
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Moscovici, S. (1976). Social influence and social change. London: Academic Press.
Moscovici, S., & Faucheux, C. (1972). Social influence, conformity bias and the study of active minorities. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 6, pp. 149-202). New York: Academic Press.Moscovici, S., Lage, E. and Naffrenchoux, M. (1969) 'Influences of a consistent minority on the responses of a majority in a colour perception task', Sociometry, Vol.32, pp.365-80.
Mugny, G., & Perez, J. A. (1991). The social psychology of minority influence.
Cambridge, MA : Cambridge University Press.
Sproull, L. (1984). The nature of managerial attention. In L. Sproull & P. Larkey (Eds.), Advances in information processing in organizations. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
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