Comparing classical management approaches with approaches to organizational communication

Most scholars believe that there is not one simple definition of communication as an organization. There are some concepts such as senders, receivers and channels which stay constant, but rather than a definition scholars have agreed on multiple approaches to organizational communication. There are four approaches to communication which are most widely known and those are: communication as information transfer, communication as transactional process, communication as strategic control, and communication as a balance of creativity and constraint.


Similarly to communication, there are generally agreed upon approaches to management. There are the classical management approaches, the human relations approach and the human resource approach. The classical management approach includes theories on scientific management, bureaucracy, division of labor, and hierarchy.


When you take a closer look it becomes easy to relate communication as an information transfer to the classical approaches to management. The main metaphor used with communication as an information transfer is a pipeline. The idea of a pipeline is easily transferred to the management hierarchy. As you can see in the photo below, information would flow from the top down, much like a pipeline. Communication uses a pipeline to represent a sender transmitting a message to a receiver, where as the pipeline in the organization would represent who is in contact with who and who works with whom.


Communication as an information transfer is often thought of as a tool people use to accomplish objectives. This idea can be applied directly to the classical approach to management. Managers use subordinates as tools to complete the tasks at hand. Communication as an information transfer is very impersonal, as is the classical management style. Communication as in information transfer believes that once the message has been sent the work is over. If the sender speaks the message there is an assumption that the receiver understands what the speaker intended. The classical management style mimics this approach. If an employee is hired for the job and told what to do there is an assumption that the work will be done because the worker fully understands. Neither communication as information transfer, nor the classical approach to management, account for different interpretations of sender and receiver or employee and employer.


Classical management includes the theory of scientific management which was developed by Frederick Taylor. This theory treated management as a true science based on certain laws , rules and assumptions. Communication as an information transfer also treats communication as an exact science. We know now that neither communication nor management are exact sciences which makes both of these theories hard to follow, but this does prove how they are interrelated.


Both communication as an information transfer and the classical management approach are early theories in their fields and have been widely improved upon and criticized. Neither is perfect in any sense or accounts for all situations. Communication as an information transfer follows the pipeline metaphor that a sender transmits a message to a receiver. Classical management also has this same idea with the hierarchy theory: a superior sends a message to a subordinate. Both of these approaches have many theories and ideas in common and are interrelated. It is not difficult to imagine those mangers that were using the classical approaches to management were also using communication as an information transfer and vice versa.