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Organisations faced with difficult decisions can use different forms and functions of organisational communication to reduce elements of risk and uncertainty.

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Some decisions are risky. Others are uncertain. In either case, companies traditionally strive to provide their employees with up-to-date, precise and elaborate information in order to reduce the risk and uncertainty of decision making.

However, decisions made by individuals are irrelevant to organisations. Just consider a manager who decides to increase investment in research and development after reading a newspaper at the breakfast table. The decision is her own. It does not affect the company she works for until other employees take note. Indeed, her individual decision may not lead to an organisational decision if others in the company reject the investment.

We rarely distinguish between decisions made by individuals and decisions made by organisations. But analysing the distinction between the two allows us to focus on what we can manage. Individual decisions are products of consciousness, whereas organisational decisions are products of communication. Thoughts cannot be managed by someone other than the individual who has the thoughts, but communication may be controlled or influenced by participation.

The idea of the communicative constitution of an organisation sees decision making as primarily a communicative problem. Decisions are not only bound by the cognitive capacity of individuals to process information; rather, interpretations of information become more important than providing facts and figures.

Companies can use the idea of an organisation’s communicative constitution to reduce risk and uncertainty in decision making by means of communication rather than overcoming the limits of individual consciousness.

Steffen Blaschke

Steffen Blaschke is an associate professor in the Department of International Business Communication at Copenhagen Business School, as well as a visiting research professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He is also
a contributing author to the blog Organization as Communication: www.orgcom.org