ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

400 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIP7. Commitment to Full and OpenTask Relevant CommunicationThe learning culture must be built on the assumption that communicationand information are central to organizational well-beingand must therefore create a multichannel communication systemthat allows everyone to connect to everyone else. This does notmean that all channels will be used or that any given channel willbe used for all things. What it does mean is that anyone must beable to communicate with anyone else and that everyone assumesthat telling the truth as best one can is positive and desirable.This principle of openness does not mean that one suspends allthe cultural rules pertaining to face and adopts a definition of opennessequivalent to the proverbial “letting it all hang out”—there isample evidence that such interpersonal openness can create severeproblems across hierarchical boundaries and in intercultural settings.It means, rather, that one must become sensitive to task-relevantinformation and be as open as possible in sharing that. One of theimportant roles for the learning leader will be to specify, in terms ofany given task, what the minimum communication system must beand what kind of information is critical to effective problem solvingand learning. More information is not necessarily a good thing,because the more we know the more questions we develop aboutwhat we don’t know. However, if a fully connected network ends upoverloading everyone with information, certain channels can bevoluntarily closed on a temporary basis. But the assumption that itis, in principle, possible and all right for anyone in the system tocommunicate with anyone else must remain in place.A fully connected network can only work if high trust or at leasthigh functional familiarity exists among all the participants. Hightrust is partly a function of leader assumptions that people can betrusted and have constructive intent. High functional familiarity isa function of the leader bringing interdependent people and unitstogether often enough to allow them to become familiar with eachother.