In the contemporary world, reorganization of businesses, companies, firms or such like organizations and corporations has been opted for owing to a couple of reasons. In line with this, the world of business has been continually challenged by the changing environment along with the competitive environment leading to reorganization as the only option.
In this context, Pegasus Company, a large aerospace research and development company has been faced with the need to have reorganization. The main problem that is faced in this company is the fact that communication has been a problem altogether. At the same time, the departments have been made based on the skill groups and thus poor communication has affected the whole company from the administration and all the other departments.
Interestingly, the reason that has been cited for the lack of interpersonal communication is the fact that the members have a very heavy scientific background. Pegasus is widely known for its wind tunnel research technology. Scale models of new products (plane, helicopter, jet, and space shuttle, outer space voyagers of various sorts among others) are tested for imperfections, safety, and practicality. Pegasus is comprised of engineers, computer aided design (CAD) designers, scientists, model makers, and administrative staff.
The company started out small and has grown rapidly over the past few years. With that group came organization into departments, by skill group (e.g., engineering, design, R&D). By now, people in different skill groups do not communicate to each other except to pass along designs, projects, and other pertinent ideas to complete project goals. This has caused many problems in the past because each type of worker has his/her own language for his/her subculture of the organization. Therefore, projects take a long time to complete due to mistakes in the plans, redoing the mistakes, and failing to take into account the specifications of the scientists and engineers by the CAD designers because they have not been clearly communicated.
Following the above description of the problem that is facing Pegasus, it is important to have a reorganization that will make it allow for communication skills, process skills, and leadership skills that can hold the company together. It is also feared by the management that employees will run away from the company due to communication difficulties that arise from communication breakdown. This has in turn, made it more difficult to get the projects completed in a timely manner. The leaders of Pegasus are afraid of losing their best and brightest employees and feel the pressing need to streamline their organization to remain effective, efficient, and competitive.
Pegasus’s Reorganization
In order to achieve the goal of reorganization and address the need for good interpersonal communication, it is required that some issues are carefully addressed. In most cases, reorganizations have been carried out by means of reducing work force (RIF). However, the case for Pegasus would wish to reorganize without RIF. For this reason it is of great importance to bring into view the Intervention Recommendations. As an internal consultant for Pegasus, I would suggest the reorganization of Pegasus that will employ the reassigning of responsibilities and integration of the administration to the various skill groups in the departments.
Pegasus is comprised of engineers, computer aided design (CAD) designers, scientists, model makers, and administrative staff. Since this is the main organization that has been in place, there is need to integrate the members. As such, it would be of great help to ensure that the administrative staff is well distributed among the skill groups. Being grouped by skills with a heavy scientific background administration, has been cited as a contributing factor to communication breakdown; this can be addressed by ensuring an administrator in each skill group as he or she would communicate with the group for efficiency and efficacy (Child, 1984).
Interpersonal communication in any organization is of great importance as it contributes to its performance. In this sense, absence of it will contribute to the delays as it has been highlighted. There is need for somebody from the administration in each skill group who can carefully communicate requirements of the project in order to achieve efficiency. This is possible if and only if the administration is trained and equipped with the right communication skills.
According to what has been presented as the main cause of the disintegration, communication breakdown has been cited as a problem. The only viable way to deal with it is to solve the root cause of this breakdown. It has also been pointed out that the skill groups that have been given as departments have their communication difficulties.
This can be addressed by neutralizing the scientific background by introducing members in the administration and skill groups well equipped with good communication skills (Smith, 2004). This calls for reassigning of responsibilities. The computer aided design (CAD) designers have been pointed out to have been making mistakes on the grounds that they are not communicated well to. An introduction of an administrator who would communicate to them would bring about timely delivery.
Presumably, the administration may be absolutely unaware of the fact that the problem of poor communication stems from their heavy scientific background. In this sense, it is important to communicate to the administration that they are the main cause of the problem and the only way out is to ensure that they embrace the right communication skills. This is to suggest that the administration should ensure that the members have the knowledge that the communication is poor and need to be corrected. In essence, this cannot be achieved by just communicating to the members concerning this fact, but rather training should be carried out on how to communicate in an organization.
Improving the Communication Process
Another intervention recommendation that can be taken into consideration is the training of the whole organization regarding communication skills and flow as well. This intervention can be approached based a good evaluation of the communication flow in the organization. In line with this, the communication process can be improved by considering the participants that perpetuate the flow. To begin with, the encoding of the message, transmission, reception, decoding and the feedback should be taken into consideration. In most cases, communication originates from the administration once they receive the contracts. The work of the skill groups is to work towards achieving the required project goal. They meet the goal of the contract by performing based on their skills. In this case, the administration should pay attention to the choice of an appropriate channel and ensuring that use of jargon is avoided (Ferguson & Ferguson, 1988).
Again in this context, improving communication should involve dealing with factors that affect the transmission. In particular, factors that produce loss of clarity such as haste, noise, over-reliance on memory should be taken into consideration. Along with this, cases of complex messages that are delivered orally should be followed up with written material. More to this point, the state and context of the reception of information should be factored in as they affect efficiency (Smith, 2004). In connection to this, the receiver’s expectations play a great role in distorting the content of any message. Following this point, information needs to be put into a clear context before moving onto detail. Another point to take into consideration is the fact that feedback plays a great role to complete any communication as well as to judge its effectiveness.
It has been pointed out that there have been delays of projects and mistakes of which improved communication can lead to a reverse of such trends. In this sense, poor communication has been realized of which training of Pegasus leadership and management would lead to a great change (Ferguson & Ferguson, 1988). It seems that the administration staff is too much concentrated in the authority without spreading to the departments. Generally, the administration should be reduced by being distributed to the various skill groups and been mixed with others with little scientific background. Additionally, it would greatly help improve communication if one or two members from the skill groups in the engineers, computer aided design (CAD) designers, scientists, model makers departments are included in the administration staff. Such a member being in the administration would ensure that communication regarding what is required is effected with ease once training has been carried out on communication skills. This would lead to avoidance of the mistakes that can result from wrong interpretation of the information from the Clients (Smith, 2004).
Role Pegasus’s Administration and Leadership in Communication
As a matter of fact, the administration should be apt and able to understand the mission and the goal of the company. This does not imply that the managerial staff of Pegasus had unskilled administration staff, but it is prerequisite to ensure that the best skill group members have some part to play in the authority as they can look into avoiding mistakes and thus improve performance. It is quiet important to ensure that management in any organization does not dictate the subordinate staff but rather be friendly as occurrences of communication breakdown are closely linked to this factor (Smith, 2004).
Accordingly, the administration should seek to increase the face to face communication together with skill of the encoder. Pegasus management would also solve the existing problem by ensuring that employee suggestion schemes are implemented along with grievance systems. Besides this point, open door policies should be encouraged of which the subordinates can be able to discuss issues with the management (Smith, 2004). Furthermore, employee surveys should be carried out in order to be able to target problem areas as well as solicit ideas for improvement.
Pegasus administration and leadership has been pointed out to have poor communication skills, process and interpersonal communications due to their heavy science background, and they also need leadership training in the form of management and executive development. In order to solve the problem with the administration, steps should be taken to involve administration staff with good skills of communication.
At the same time, skill group departments should be structured in a manner that they involve other members from other departments for efficacy. This would call for cross functional teams. This is to suggest that even if departments are to remain the same, other members from other departments should be in the staff of such departments to ensure communication is necessitated between the departments for efficacy, competency and efficiency (Ferguson & Ferguson, 1988).
From the intervention recommendations highlighted, it is important to note that performance of any organization is so much affected by communication. Training of the administration staff and leaders of Pegasus would improve its performance. Above and beyond, the integration of the members from the various departments by ensuring flow of communication would also help reorganize without necessarily reducing work force. Again, ensuring that the administration is integrated to the various skill departments would lead to competency, efficiency and efficacy altogether.
From a broader point of view, restructuring of the administration staff of Pegasus by reducing the number of leaders who are basically scientifically based and integrating others who are good in communication from the other departments would help a great deal. Likewise, some of the members of the administration should be integrated and given to the leadership of the skill departments.
