EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES
CHAPTER TWO
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
Communication Strategy
Bronn (2001) defines a communication strategy as the selection of appropriate communication objectives and the identification of the specific brand awareness and brand attitude strategy. This general strategy has to be linked to the objectives of the organization. It is a single, coherent narrative that describes communication solution to a problem. Cornelissen (2009) puts forth that communication strategy provides a link between business objectives and communications planning and delivery.
Argenti and Forman (2002) explain that a properly executed communication strategy helps in integrating policies and procedures within and outside the organization on how communication will support departmental objectives, the strategic choices taken and why. This creates continuity in communications activity over an extended period especially in institutions facing employee turnover since they form part of the process of decision making process (Eisenberg, 2000).
Fassin (2009) effective communication enables the organization to articulate its objectives and measures of success when evaluating performance to mitigate communication risks. There is no way that an organization can function well with the outside world if it does not have a sound plan for how to inform the public of what they do. A communication strategy can take on many different looks, ranging from a one-on-one interaction to a global campaign (Christensen et al., 2008).
Strategic Planning
Heracleous (1998) defines strategic planning as the management process to creating and executing long-term goals and strategy. It may also extend to control mechanisms for guiding the implementation of the strategy. Mintzberg (1994) strategic planning is executed by strategic planners or strategists, who involve many parties and research sources in their analysis of the organization and its relationship to the environment in which it competes (Allison and Kaye, 2005).
The importance of strategic planning is that it serves as an organizational roadmap to achieving competitive advantage. Strategic planning acts as a game plan for how to please customers and to improve financial performance. Strickland et al. (2008) argues that companies that plan strategies are more successful than those companies that do not. Strategic planning is it incorporates the entire organization and thus it informs and shapes the business plan by providing a clear guide on how a strategy will be implemented. Through strategic planning the firms can be able to shape and actualize its decisions and ideas that have a long-term performance (Erica, 2012).
Theoretical Foundation
This study reviewed on the theoretical studies and mainly concentrated on two theories which are communication theory and the stakeholder’s theory.
Communication Theory
This text is concerned with communication theory, so it is important to be clear about the term communication. The everyday view of communication is quite different from the view of communication taken by communication scholars. In the business world, for example, a popular view is that communication is synonymous with information.
Thus, the communication process is the flow of information from one person to another (Dale, 1969). Interactive multimedia is a communication tool. It therefore seems reasonable to begin our quest for theory upon which to base investigations concerning the effectiveness of design and development decisions in the realm of communications theory. Communication encompasses a great deal of human (and animal) activity. Reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing images, and creating images are all acts of communication.
Communication encompasses a great deal of human (and animal) activity. Reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing images, and creating images are all acts of communication. There are as well many more subtle communication activities that may be conscious or unconscious, such as expression, gesture, “body language” and nonverbal sounds (Ruben, 1984). The process of communication has been the subject of study for thousands of years, during which time the process has come to be appreciated with increasing complexity. Communication is viewed as simply one activity among many others, such as planning, controlling, and managing (Schramm, 1954).
Stakeholder Theory
The core idea behind the stakeholder theory is that organizations that manage their stakeholder relationships effectively will survive longer and perform better than those organizations that don't (Shiller, 2003). Stakeholder theory concerns the explanations of firm performance in a competitive environment (Porter, 1980). Stakeholder theory suggests that the purpose of a business is to create as much value as possible for stakeholders. In order to succeed and be sustainable over time, executives must keep the interests of customers, suppliers, employees, communities and shareholders aligned and going in the same direction. The approaches to be used nowadays by firms and organizations is to factor in stakeholder interests in order to enhance the enterprises relationships with society and secure better prospects of financial success with the help of stakeholder analysis firm decisions can profit from views that go beyond the narrow interests of stockholders and shareholders investing in a business.
The stakeholder approach draws from the "open systems" literature which assumes that the organization exists in a complicated network of relationships where simple cause and effect predictions cannot explain the myriad influences shaping organizational outcomes. Moreover, the open systems perspective recognizes that relationships also have temporal dimensions, and that organizations are impacted by elements of the system with as much temporal variety (immediate versus delayed, instantaneous versus prolonged) as they have positional variety (Ackoff, 1999). The cross-decision approach applies this open systems perspective to the tactical deployment of stakeholder theory it focuses on balancing stakeholder interests across the system (a series of decisions over time) rather than on a decision-by-decision basis.
Communication Strategy
Communication channels are important because without them, the message wouldn’t get from the sender to the receiver, the message couldn’t be negotiated, and managers wouldn’t be able to interpret work situations and influence or direct employees (Lengel & Daft, 1988). However, even more important is choosing the right channel for the right message, because channels have different strengths and weaknesses. The type and essence of the media can enhance or distort the message, as well as influence the receiver’s interpretation of the message. McLuhan (1960) even points out that the medium is the message, hence emphasising the significance of the medium. Traditional face-to-face communication is often preferred by the employees; however, it is relatively expensive for the company to execute; and sometimes impossible to do so e.g. for temporal or geographical reasons.
In contemporary society, organizations no longer focus only on bureaucratic and formal management and communication. The interpersonal interaction among employees in the organization is increasingly paid attention to. People do not only formally disseminate information related to work and their organization, but also talk about themselves and their emotions. Talking about non-work related topics for social reasons occurs commonly among members of organizations. Through this kind of communication, social networks can be built among employees in the organizations.
As a result of the organization members’ curiosity, interpersonal attraction, and social interaction, informal communication have become a common feature of the social networks in today’s organizations (Kreps 1990).
Strategic Planning
Strategic planning is a corporate managerial practice by means of which a set of processes are undertaken in order to define a range of strategies that will contribute to the achieving of the state corporation’s mission statement. A great variety of definitions of strategic planning have been expressed in the literature. Grant (2005) provides an extensive review of the strategic planning history from “long range planning” until the current debates between “strategic management” and “strategic thinking”. Bryson (2008) claims that meeting the mandates and fulfilling the mission should result from strategic planning, which is defined as producing fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what the organization is, what it does, and why it does it. The objective of the strategic planning processes is to design competitive strategies that enable the firm to find a position in the present environment (Porter, 2009), and to go beyond perceptions of the current situation to distinguish the enterprise into the future.
According to Bresser and Bishop (2003), strategic planning process is the product of the best minds inside and outside the corporation. The process considers future implications of current decisions, adjusts plans to the emerging business environment, manages the business analytically, and links, directs, and controls complex enterprises through a practical, working management system. Strategic planning practice involves formulation of vision and mission statement, performance of situational analysis and finally strategy implementation and choice (Pearce and Robbinson, 2008).
The formality of strategic planning has been associated with the field of strategic planning from its earliest foundation. The early developments significantly include that of Andrews (Ansoff, 1965). According to Bresser and Bishop (2003), formalization is the degree to which the norms of the organization are explicitly defined. He further distinguished between “formalization”, referring to whether these norms are written down in manuals and other documents. Formality in strategic planning requires explicit practices. The reason of having strategic planning written in detail is to ensure strategic planning process receives commitment from those who are affected by it and to allow an explicit evaluation and clearly specify objectives is part of the formal strategic planning (Armstrong, 1982).
Since the environment is continually changing, strategic planning is a continuous process in the state corporation. It is the process by which state corporations derive a strategy to enable them to anticipate and respond to the changing dynamic environment in which they operate. In a dynamic state corporation environment, the plans of many principals are constantly in the course of modification, revision and refinement. So as Mintzberg (2004) declares, emergent or actual strategy can diverge from planned strategy. Parallel to the abundance of strategic planning definitions, there are many different models about how strategic planning has to be overcome by the state corporations. Nevertheless, many of these models are very similar and it can be considered that a reasonable degree of consensus does exist on a normative model of the strategic planning and management processes.
Strategic decisions determine the organizational relations to its external environment, encompass the entire organization, depend on input from all of the functional areas in the organization and have a direct influence on the administrative and operational activities and are vitally important to the long term health of an organization (Shirley, 1982). Although strategic planning is important, what is more important is how it is practiced in different organizations. Many organizations keep on redefining their mission and vision statements, organize seminars and include consultants to formulate strategies so as to achieve competitive advantage and be able to deal with the unexpected environmental changes.
Strategic planning process is important as it leads to customer focus, quality management, technology strategies, research and development, production operation strategy, human resources strategies and financial strategies, performance of the organization of the organization achievement must be supported by strategic decisions. According to Bryson (2004), strategic planning is a disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization or other identity is what it does and why it does it. It allows organization allows organization to anticipate and deal with dynamic and rapidly changing environment and accounts for allocation of resources.
The planning team is now charged with keeping current strategies and/or developing resolutions as responses to the derived strategic issues identified in the preceding step. The outcome of the strategic issues resolution step, according to Bryson (2005), does not necessitate or mandate change to occur in purposes, policies, programs, procedures, resource allocations, decisions, or actions. Patterns of practice represent an organization's past and current strategies, and the status quo may, in fact, exemplify effective modes that can adequately address the named strategic issues.
Many times, however, development is needed to sufficiently address strategic issue resolution.
Challenges Facing Implementation of Communication Strategy
According to Alexander (1985), the ten most frequently occurring implementation of communication strategy problems include underestimating the time needed for implementation and major problems surfacing that had not been anticipated, in addition uncontrollable factors in the external environment had an adverse impact.
Reed and Buckley (1988) discuss problems associated with strategy implementation identifying four key areas for discussion. Another problem is when management style is not appropriate for the strategy being implemented, they cite the example of the entrepreneurial risk taker may be an ideal candidate for a strategy involving growth, but may be wholly inappropriate for retrenchment (Reed and Buckley, 1988).
Insufficiency fund is another common implementation of communication strategy. This may be as a result of lack of resources which include financial and human or indivisibility of resources. Established organizations may experience changes in the business environment that can make a large part of their resource base redundant resources, which may be unable to free sufficient funds to invest in the new resources that are needed and their cost base will be too high (Johnson and Scholes, 2002). Studies by Okumus (2003) found that the main barriers to the implementation of communication strategy include lack of coordination and support from other levels of management and resistance from lower levels and lack of or poor planning activities.
Meldrum an Atkinson (1998) lists out a number of implementation pitfalls such as isolation, lack of stakeholder commitment, strategic, drift, strategic dilution, strategic isolation, failure to understand progress, initiative fatigue, impatience, and not celebrating success.
Changes do not implement themselves and it is only people that make them happen (Bryson, 2005). Selecting people for the key positions by putting a strong management team with the right personal chemistry and mix of skills is one of the first strategy implementation steps (Thompson and Strickland, 2003). They point out that assembling a capable team is one of the cornerstones of the organization-building task. Strategy implementation must determine the kind of core management team they need to execute the strategy and then find the right people to fill each slot. Staffing issues can involve new people with skills (Hunger and Wheelen, 2005).
Whilst the strategy should be chosen in a way that it fits the organization structure the process of matching structure to strategy is complex (Raps and Kauffman, 2005). The structure that served the organization well at a certain size may no longer be appropriate for its new or planned size. The existing structure and processes in the organization support in different ways, there is likely to be problems should the existing structures be used to implement the changes (Meldrum and Atkinson, 1998).
The current structures may as well distort and dilute the intended strategy to the point where no discernible change takes place.
Cultural impact under estimation is yet another challenge to implementation of communication strategy. The implementation of a strategy often encounters rough going because of deep rooted cultural biases. This causes resistance to implementation of new strategies especially in organizations with defensive cultures. This is because they see changes as threatening and tend to favor “continuity” and “security” (Wang, 2000).
Aaltonen and Ikavalko (2001) indicate that the amount of implementation of communication strategy in most organizations is large with both written and oral communication being used in form of top down communications. However, a great amount of information does not guarantee understanding and there is still much to be done in the field of communicating strategies. According to Wang (2000), communication should be two way so that it can provide information to improve understanding and responsibility and to motivate staff. Also they argue that communication should not be seen as a one-off activity throughout the implementation process. Before any strategy can be implemented, it must be clearly understood. Clear understanding of a strategy gives purpose to the activities of each employee and allows linking whatever task is at hand to the overall organizational direction (Raps and Kauffman, 2005).
Communication Strategy and Strategic Planning
Many theorists such as Higgins (1979) and Daugherty (2003) emphasise that communication in strategic planning is an important element of, and complementary to, the overall strategic communication management process. According to Dozier, Grunig and Grunig (1995), ‘senior management engage in strategic communication planning when they make strategic decisions in a proactive manner’. Sound strategic communication planning is the critical success factor in developing effective crisis communication strategies – and must never be neglected’. Fearn-Banks (1996) contends that the value of strategic communication planning derives largely from the detailed analysis and strategic thought that surrounds the process rather than the end product. The process of strategic communication planning is often overly ‘structured and hierarchical’ and can therefore hinder positive action during events that have not been planned for.
Smith (2005) propose models that describe the strategic communication planning process. The process generally follows a distinctive phased pattern, with a series of steps outlined for each particular phase. While the content of each model is remarkably similar, the sequence and timing of steps may vary from model to model.
These steps generally include: defining the communication problem using research and analysis; using techniques such as ‘brainstorming’ to develop plans and programmes to deal with each communication problem; allocating adequate resources and budgets for each element of the plan; deciding on appropriate deadlines and a clear delineation of responsibilities for each particular element of the plan; implementing the plan through action and communication; and finally, the strategic evaluation of each of the communication programmes in order to determine its success of failure.
Central to a successful communication planning process is the ability to make decisions strategically. This involves choosing an optimal course of action from a range of possible alternatives. According to Clemen and Reilly (2001), when making important communication decisions, decision-makers can utilise modelling tools such as decision trees in order to aid analysis. Important variables such as uncertainty need to be factored into the process. Other tools, such as probability analysis, can assist in this regard.
Many barriers exist to the conduct of effective strategic communication planning. These include a lack of strategic communication knowledge or experience, inadequate consultation and deliberation, a failure to agree clear goals and objectives for the implementation of the programme, inadequate or unrealistic time frames, unsuitable processes of internal clearance, a lack of coordination, and the absence of flexibility (Temple 2002).
According to the Price (1989), one of the key characteristics that differentiates strategic communication management from tactical management is that practitioners undertake ongoing, systematic and strategic communication research. Many theorists have identified a number of different approaches to communication research. Using a continuum, Broom and Dozier (1990) describe one category of non-strategic communication practice that utilises the ‘no-research-approach’ or ‘seat-of-the-pants’ approach. This approach is considered to be individualistic, subjective and personal, ‘with little use for social or behavioural research’ (Grunig 1992). Further along the continuum, Austin, Pinkleton and Dixon (2000) describe ‘informal research’ where programmes are developed using an unscientific or unrepresentative approach to the discipline. At the optimal end of the continuum, Grunig (1992) describes a ‘scientific management’ approach to communication research. Using this method, strategic practitioners engage in different types of communication research, that includes ‘formative’, ‘programme’ and ‘summative’ research. Adopting a scientific approach to research, the strategic communication manager can obtain much vital information necessary to make complex decisions in relation to goal setting, programme direction, message emphasis, and budget allocation (Simpson 1992). Strategic communication research also allows decision-makers to have greater confidence that their findings reflect reality, not just decision-makers’ perceptions of reality (Broom and Dozier 1990).