A Case Study of Organizational Communication Cycles at a Private Middle School

By Carrie L. Leonard

INTRODUCTION

The investigator will examine collected data to illustrate the system of communication used to align goals at the

various organizational levels of a private school in Virginia.

Why?Reasons for Researching

Organizational Communication Systems...

To Uncover Organizational Goals in Order to Discover a Unified Focus...

• Educational leaders and stakeholders need to perceive a unified focus to carry out the exact purpose and origin of educational policy and programming.

• For the purposes of this proposal, the investigator will carry out analysis to determine how a school works towards a unified focus within an education system.

To Illustrate an Organization’s Communication System... This resource will help identify how goal communication moves through an organization, assembles, and functions.

To Constructing a Goal Alignment Resource for Educational Leaders...

Documenting organizational communication components into

and back out of a school will provide educational leaders with

a framework resource.

By Providing Evidence of the Reality of Organizational Goal Alignment in an Educational

Organization...

The investigator will track the organizational communication practice of moving goal-oriented information from central administration through to the individual school building in order to provide a tool to help educational leaders to uncover the reality of aligned goals in educational organizations.

To Provide Leaders with a tool to Identify Barriers to Strategic Alignment...

• The identification of these variables, within an organization, can assist in alerting leaders to possible communication barriers.

• The framework developed may highlight areas in the system where leaders can make improvements in the strategic alignment of the educational organization.

To Inspire Future Scholarship...This study may inspire scholars to continue organizational

communication research in the field of education.

How Does it Work?

The investigator seeks to illustrate the mechanisms behind organizational communication that affect performance within the school.

The Tools Used...

This proposed case study uses artifacts, stakeholder interviews, consensus mapping, and organizational mapping as four sources of valid data to triangulate the results, but also to build the theoretical bridge.

The Study will Address:

How does an educational organization’s communication system support the alignment of strategic goal and objective information at each level of the organization?

a. How do individual stakeholders participate in a communication system within an educational organization?

b. How are goals and objectives aligned at the various sub-units of an educational organization?

The Phases: Overview• Phase one consists of the construction of an organizational map that

will be resourceful in other phases of data collection. Organizational mapping will provide a guide for a communication map.

• Phase two of the data collection will entail the collection and analysis of various artifacts, documents, archival records, and any additional interviews that may be required after the second phase of analysis.

• Phase three consists of participant interviews.

• Finally, in phase four, a consensus map illustrates the true illustration of the communication of goal information in the case school because of the culmination of the study’s data collections prior findings.

Phase One

In order to investigate how educational leaders work to obtain and comprehend organizational goal information, manage this information, and assist stakeholders to understand goal information, the investigator must build an image of a school communication system.

Organizational Communication System Mapping

Building an image of a system of communication in a school, in order to detect goal alignment, barriers to goal alignment, and distortions to goal alignment, will require a number of steps:

• Each participant will be asked to help construct an illustration of what they perceive the system of communication to be.

• The maps will be compared and contrasted.

• After analysis, a final map of the system is constructed.

Phase Two: Artifact Collection

• In phase two, the collection of various artifacts occurs over the course of the study.

• Documentation and archival records are stable, unobtrusive, exact, and have a broad coverage.

• Physical artifacts provide insight into operations and culture.

Data Collection• A request for participants to save each document and to

forward email to the researcher emerges.

• The documents need reviewed and analyzed.

• Information pertains to the organizational information that they receive during the school year.

• The volunteer stores documents in the bin provided.

• Gathering of the contents of this bin occurs once a month.

Confidentiality Regarding Artifact Analysis

• All original documents need returned to the volunteers.

• Any artifact analysis forms resulting from the analyzed artifacts will be stored in a secure area for a period of six years.

• After this amount of time has passed, the researcher destroys the artifact forms.

Content Analysis of Artifacts• The content analysis of artifacts acts as a reference during the various phases of data

collection.

• Content analysis of goal information documents, distributed through the study period, provide evidence of the organizational leader’s vision for helping to attain administrative goals at the school.

• The investigator seeks data, within these documents, regarding how the leader communicates this vision to stakeholders.

• Through the data resulting from content analysis, the investigator seeks to uncover how stakeholders synthesize information and implement policy and programming.

• Interviews uncover the understanding of and commitment to the goals of the organization by school stakeholders.

Phase Three: Interviews• Phase three involves leader interviews and stakeholder interviews.

• For the purposes of this study, the author of this proposal will be the only interviewer.

• A digital recorder chronicles participant responses over the phone.

• A Dragon transcription package automatically transcribes the interviews.

• The employment of a transcriptionist transpires if the need arises.

• The transcriptionist will sign a confidentiality statement.

Phase Four: Consensus Map• In phase four, a consensus map creates an illustration of the true nature of the

communication of goal information in the case school because of the culmination of the study’s data collections findings.

• In order to map the components and the arrangements of the components in a system, all system properties, network links, and the roles of the system sub-units require identification.

• The map will require analysis prior to construction.

• Construction uses themes uncovered during the analysis and coding of the interview data.

• Simply put, the organization will play the “Telephone” game.

Data Analysis

• Data collected from the tools will be coded using NVivo software.

• Major themes and minor themes are sought.

• Mapping and a content analysis of artifacts collected during the school year triangulate interview findings.