Grapevine Comminication Essay

633 Words3 Pages
PERCEPTIONS OF THE VALUE AND INFLUENCE OF GRAPEVINE John W. NewStrom, Robert E. Monczka and Willian E. Reif formulate a strategy to assess the perceptions of people along two independent dimensions: evaluative and potency(Perceptions Of The Grapevine: Its Value and Influence). The evaluative dimension assesses the perceived goodness or badness of grapevine while the potency dimension covers the perceived strength and weakness of grapevine. The bipolar adjective pairs selected to record perceptions along the evaluative dimension were: fair-unfair, good-bad, valuable- worthless, pleasant-unpleasant, and clear-hazy. The potency pairs were: strong-weak, hard-soft, and large-small. When the perceptions were analysed on the basis of these dimensions in formal organizations, over half of the respondents were found to view grapevine as a negative factor in their organizational environment. Many respondents also showed mixed emotions to the grapevine owing to the fact that some respondents indicated how they felt when they were an integral part of it, compared with others, who indicated how they felt when it caused managerial problems for them. The potency mean showed that the grapevine was perceived to be fairly pervasive in the respondents' organizations. When the means for the evaluative and potency dimensions are analyzed in combination, an unfortunate combination of results emerges—the grapevine was simultaneously perceived to be both negative and influential—a potentially troublesome situation. When the same dimensions were tested in informal organizational set-up, the results showed that grapevine was considered to be the factor least supportive of personal need satisfaction. In terms of its perceived strength in the organization (potency dimension), grapevine was seen as being significantly less influential than group cohesion, personal influence, and voluntary
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