Content area
Full Text
Introduction
Competent, efficient organizational communication is essential to produce high-quality work and services. Numerous studies have recognized that the quality of work and workplace productivity are heavily influenced by organizational communication (Clampitt and Downs, 1993), with many business problems being the product of poor communication policies (Tourish and Hargie, 2000). Therefore, useful instruments required for assessing organizational communication have been developed in the USA and have been utilized there and in Europe. However, to date, no academic development of an instrument to assess organizational communication has occurred in Japan. An instrument compatible with Japanese organizations needs to be developed. Furthermore, the characteristics and management practices of organizations and the necessary information to perform tasks for workers vary across industries. The target industry in the present study is care facilities, and in such a health organization, exchange of information regarding visitors and residents among their families and workers at facilities as well as among different kinds of workers (e.g. among care workers, nurses, and social workers) is indispensable. Therefore, the present study aims to develop the measures required to assess organizational communication for Japanese organizations, specifically focusing on Japanese care facilities.
Literature survey
A Study on how to diagnose and elucidate organizational communication effectiveness and how to identify organizational communication problems are known as a communication audit study. Comprehensive research for the development of a communication audit questionnaire was conducted by Downs and Hazen (1977), who developed the widely used Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire (CSQ), and by the members of the International Communication Association (ICA) under the leadership of Gerald M. Goldhaber from 1971 to 1979 (Downs and Adrian, 2004), who developed the popular ICA questionnaire.
Communication audits were at least partly adopted in the early 1980s by approximately 45 percent of the Fortune 500 companies in the USA (Downs, 1988). Unfortunately, the popularity of communication audits has never been recognized in Japan. As a result, there have been few communication audit studies in Japan, and no communication audit instruments have been developed specifically for Japanese organizations.
Incompatibility of Western instruments of communication with Japanese organizations
As far as is known, only the current researcher has attempted to adapt US-developed communication audit questionnaires for Japanese workers (Yamaguchi, 2012a, b). In one of the studies (Yamaguchi, 2012a), questions adapted...