organizational metamyth

Much of the work in organizational culture has taken an ethnographic approach, studying the culture of a particular organization. As Cheney et al. note, "ethnographers . . . study how social realities are constructed locally" (p. 81). The research involves observation or participant observation and detailed descriptions of organization members' everyday sensemaking.

Over 10 years ago, John Haas, Beverly Davenport Sypher, and I observed that although there are distinctions across organizations in cultural practices and other indicators, there are commonalities. We'd been involved in collecting data in several organizations on communication climate and information flow. What interested us was that in every organization, members wanted more information, no matter how much information they already received. With one exception, across all channels and sources, organization members wanted more communication. The only source they didn't want more information from was the grapevine--they didn't want more rumors. Yet, the grapevine was rated as both healthy and accurate in every organization. In the Journal of Business Communication article we published on our research, we identified this desire for more communication as a metamyth "whose basic tenet is that 'more communication is better'" (p. 196).

What also sets apart this research from more traditional organizational culture studies is the use of quantitative methods. Examining survey data from five different organizations allowed us to observe the metamyth trend that ethnographic data would not have revealed.

~ Professor Cyborg