THE ROLE OF INFORMATION AND INSTRUCTIONS ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION AND TASK PERFORMANCE

Since Barnard's (1938) statement that the structure and scope of an organization was primarily determined by communication techniques, it has been accepted that communication is vital to organizational performance. Until recently, a relationship between performance and communication was tacitly assumed but not empirically demonstrated. Of late, correlational studies have begun to explore this relationship on a more systematic basis, but many have measured communication only indirectly. When a relationship has been found between communication and performance, the direction of the causality has been questioned (O'Reilly and Roberts, 1977).;The purpose of this research was to establish directionality between communication and performance. It was hypothesized that improved communication would lead to improved performance, but that improved performance would not lead to improved communication. The independent variables were three levels of communication instructions: clear, misleading and no instructions; three levels of performance information: accurate, inaccurate and no information; and a combination thereof to constitute nine experimental conditions.;Subjects were 108 Hofstra University students who volunteered to be in the study. They were randomly assigned in groups of three to one of the nine conditions. Subjects were given discrete pieces of information (rationales) which they were to communicate to their fellow group members. Knowledge of these rationales facilitated answering the questionnaires measuring task performance and the communication indices.;It was found that reception was significantly related to task performance, and that communication instructions had a significant positive effect on all dependent measures of communication. As predicted, performance information was found to have a significant effect on task performance and not on communication. However, communication instructions did not have a significant effect on performance.;This researcher used an objective method of measuring transmission and reception of messages (Kaplan, 1980) and a specific task to measure performance (Hall, 1971), in order to ascertain the relationship between communication and task performance. The Kaplan method produced four measures of communication: intragroup reception, transmission, direct reception and correct reception. The Hall task is an exercise called "Walk on the Moon", which produced an individual performance score for each subject.;This may be due to an insensitive performance measure, and suggestions are offered for future research with the same communication method but with a different performance task.