6.3. STRUCTURING THE ORGANIZATION FOR OPTIMAL COMMUNICATION

People are more motivated if they have clear goals and know how their job fits the goals of the organization than if they do not have this information. Thus, structuring the organization for optimal communication can help individual motivation.

There has been a good deal of literature on the question of how to expose members of research and development laboratories to the information they need to have to do their jobs well. One concern has been the accessibility of technical literature to the members of the laboratory (Fisher, 1980). To ensure that people will become acquainted with other activities of the laboratory and with new technical developments, there has been a greater focus on increasing interdependence among projects within a laboratory.

It has been argued that people should become aware of activities in other parts of the laboratory because they can often pick up ideas from seeing what others are doing (Allen, 1970; Fisher, 1980). One idea has been to increase the sharing of such facilities as coffee pots, restrooms, and computer equipment in order to increase interaction and the likelihood that people in the laboratory will get to know one another well.

It is obvious that members of the laboratory should be encouraged to participate in national meetings and professional societies, to hold offices in professional associations, and to serve on the editorial boards of journals, since all these activities increase communication and are likely to bring new information to the laboratory. Establishing contacts with academic scientists who are working in the same general area as the laboratory can also be very helpful (Fisher, 1980). Finally, the architecture of the laboratory can have some beneficial effects for the flow of information.

Allen (1970) has described the effects of a so-called nonterritorial office that was built by the research and development section of a small chemical firm. In this case, all of the office walls were removed and an individual could choose to work anywhere in the area, depending on what was convenient. The effect of this change appeared to increase communication, both in the number of communications per person and the number of individuals with whom the average engineer communicated. This, of course, would not work well in situations where projects are of longer durations and considerable uninterrupted time is required for research activities.