Under-Communicating
Under-communicating is a factor which may significantly affect the performance of stakeholder teams and the perceptions of recipient groups. According to Sipes (2015), “timely and frequent communication is crucial”, and it has a direct impact on the way organizational effectiveness is achieved (p. 50). The concept of under-communicating assumes that the information is delivered ineffectively to recipients and project teams.
Communication serves as a mechanism of control when the recipient is asked to bring their actions into line with the organization’s strategy. In the setting of under-communication, the individual may lose their motivation since they will not understand what should be done to improve their performance.
Effective communication is a two-way process, which implies that all stakeholder groups exchange information in regards to all aspects of the project implementation. It includes “meetings, status reports, presentations at different steering team meetings such as executive steering team (EST) and project steering team (PST) meetings, and documentation in a project notebook” (Sipes, 2015, p. 83).
An example of under-communicating is when each team functions autonomously, and the information on the progress is not disseminated properly. In this case, the units do not receive the data they need for making adequate decisions (Sipes, 2015). Due to insufficient message exchange, they are unable to effectively identify and evaluate alternative solutions, which may result in time delays and slower task execution.
Over-Communicating
It should be noted that the concept of over-communicating does exist in the corporate environment. It implies over-providing information to different stakeholder groups to avoid situations when important details have been ignored or left out. Over-communicating means that decision-makers will spend a lot of time delivering and accepting feedback from the team members in regards to task delegation and its execution. Nevertheless, “the smaller and more detailed task help to facilitate control of the project” (Sipes, 2015, p. 66). Therefore, over-communication of information will result in greater organizational effectiveness and ensure the risks of project failure are mitigated.
An example of over-communicating may be weekly meetings with stakeholder teams when they are capable of working autonomously and require intermediate control or supervision. The negative implications of this approach include the lost time and energy for both recipients and senders of the message (Sipes, 2015). Nonetheless, the positive outcomes of over-communicating the details or progress will be numerous.
Important information will be constantly collected, and the possibility of losing it will be minimized. Progress reports will be prepared in a timely manner, and all the stakeholder groups will be aware of the actual project status (Sipes, 2015). Thus, the negative effects of over-communicating are short-term while the positive ones are long-term in character, which means that the over-provision of information will inevitably result in better project outcomes.
Reference
Sipes, C. (2015). Project management for the advanced practice nurse. New York, NY: Springer Publishing.