Office Politics

Having the election this week I found the dynamics of political party persuasion quite interesting. Typically it is not a topic that anyone talks about in out office., almost as if it is taboo and offensive which to some I am sure it is. After the election on Tuesday, it seemed that all apprehension to discuss party affiliation was gone. Obama supporters were very outspoken about their excitement that their candidate had one and McCain supporters expressed their excitement in the historic relevance of the win but also their fears from the elections outcome. It also seemed to me that McCain supporters felt uncomfortable expressing their support. So, Obama supporters were very expressive and McCain supporters did not say much at all. No matter what my political affiliation is, I find the dynamics of communications about it in organizations quite intriguing.

Suggestion for future research

My research these past few weeks has been on satisfaction of communications in an organization and how that effects job satisfaction, performance and commitment. I had a very difficult time finding recent articles about this topic and so I started to think about future research that could be conducted around this topics. In the research I did find it seemed that this topic was very popular in the 70’s and 80’s and may have been researched out. I believe that there are still opportunities to study this topic in current organizations. I think that a very interesting area for research around this concept is how the new communication technologies effect these same work-related dimensions. In my organization, and I believe in many others, there is a new communication trend to use web 2.0 technologies to communicate such as blogs, video blogs, wikis, and social networking websites. I know that it has been very difficult to foster adoption in our organization to use these technologies because people feel they are not the best for communication. I think that it would be interesting to see how satisfied people actually are with the communication that comes from these tools and if in turn job satisfaction, productivity, and commitment are effected.