Organizational communication

2. According to Jane Callanan, Jim Sims after being appointed as the new CEO at CTP focused mainly on uplifting the morale of the employees and rebuilding their lost trust in the management. As a part of this task, he implemented three key rules i. e. honoring the commitments, encourage free flow of communication, and involve more people into the management of the company and keeping them updated regarding the marketing and financial details of the company. He held meetings every Friday which were mostly informal and were attended in full by the employees and practiced full disclosure. He encouraged them to ask questions or complaints either directly or through a fishbowl kept in the companys cafeteria. He displayed great willingness and enthusiasm to answer questions quickly and on the spot (p. 85).
These changes proved to be highly effective because of various factors such as effective leadership headed by the new CEO Jim Sims; a significant boost in employee morale and in the words of one of the technical directors at CTP, development of “ a critical mass of committed people” (p. 86). There is ample evidence which suggests a direct relationship between effective leadership and employee productivity as well as between employee morale and productivity. Furthermore the manner in which a leader behaves and communicates with the followers during challenging periods directly affects their relationship with the employees resulting in improved performance and commitment on the part of the employees (Kasper-Fuehrer and Ashkanasy, 2001; Connell et al., 2003; Costa, 2003; Dirks and Ferrin, 2002; Corbitt and Martz, 2003, Conrad and Poole, 2012).
The effectiveness of the new leadership could be observed from the fact that immediately after the new policy (the three rules) was implemented a significant and apparent change in there was a marked improvement in the employee morale, the company was able to hire more employees, secure more contracts, and stabilize the financial position of the company through improved performance (p. 86).
References:
Connell, J., Ferres, N., Travaglione, T., (2003). Trust in the workplace. Journal of Management. 3(3): p. 113-118
Conrad, C. R., Poole, M. S., (2012). Strategic organizational communication: In a global economy. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons Publication, p. 431-435
Corbitt G, Martz B (2003). Groupware case studies: Trust, commitment and the free expression of ideas. Team Performance Management, 9(1): p. 16-22.
Dirks, K. T., Ferrin, D. L., (2002). Trust in leadership: Meta-analytic findings and implications for research and practice. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4): p. 611-628
Kasper-Fuehrer, E., Ashkanasy, N. M., (2001). Communicating trustworthiness and building trust in inter-organizational virtual organizations. Journal of Management, 27(3): p. 235-254