Master Thesis
Master of Business Administration (MBA)

Corporate communication problems - A study to find obstacles and chances

Fachhochschule für Ökonomie und Management
FOM - Essen

by

Lars Deutsch

Berlin, August 2005

List of Contents

List of Contents ... I
List of Figures  ... II

1 Introduction  ... 1
1.1 Objectives and Observations  ... 2
1.2 Research Background ... 2
1.3 Scope and Structure ... 2
1.4 Focus and Limitations  ... 5

2 Existing approaches to improve communication and cooperation ... 6
2.1 Interdisciplinary education approaches  ... 6
2.2 Agile Software Development  ... 7
2.3 The learning organization ... 8
2.4 Thesis from existing approaches  ... 10

3 Theories on the causes of communication problems ... 11
3.1 Communication theory  ... 11
3.2 Models of conflicts in communication  ... 14
3.3 Personality and Values in communication  ... 17
3.4 Motives ... 19
3.4.1 McClelland Achievement-Power-Affiliation theory  ... 20
3.4.2 Muslow’s Hierarchy of Needs ... 22
3.4.3 Summary of motivation theories  ... 24
3.4.4 Motivation priorities of professionals  ... 25
3.5 Competence at work  ... 28
3.5.1 Definition of competencies ... 29
3.5.2 Competencies of non technical staff ... 33
3.5.3 Competencies of technical staff ... 35
3.5.4 Key differences in competencies between technical and non-technical staff  ... 37
3.6 Key findings of previous research ... 38

4 Study on finding communication obstacles and chances  ... 40
4.1 Tentative Hypotheses  ... 41
4.2 Block A Interviewee Background  ... 42
4.3 Block B Competencies  ... 45
4.4 Block C Motivation  ... 51
4.5 Block D opinions on corporate communication and cooperation  ... 59

5 Conclusion and further research  ... 67

Appendix A Interview guideline  ... 71
Bibliography ... 72

1 Introduction

This study has been motivated by the author’s perception of the problems experienced in his professional career in the IT industry.

Quite often IT projects seem not to have the expected outcome. However to the experience of the author this is not due to the skills of the participants (technical and non-technical). Moreover bilateral communication problems seem to prevent a full understanding of each others problems.

Prof. Dr. Wendt from HPI Institute says that “From practical software development statements emerge, which say that the serious problems are of a non-technical kind. A basic problem seems to be that communication between [project] participants does not work.”¹

Further aspects of this problem can be found in Melzer (1989), Caroll (1988). This can lead to misunderstandings what value an IT department contributes. In a Microsoft conducted study only 10 percent of IT investments were seen profitable by non technical management although in reality up to 41 percent were profitable². The problem seems to be understood by IT managers as in a survey in 2003 “nearly three-quarters of the respondents said they have had to cut their budgets by more than 15% over the past two years and they think more effective communication with senior management about the value IT generates could have reduced those cutbacks by half.” ³ In projects the real problem to be solved is filtered by hierarchical levels, differences in education and different meanings of specific topics⁴.

Even if technical and non-technical project participants think they understand each other, in reality they don’t⁵. These problems result in unnecessary work for all project participants and cost a lot of money. IBM estimates show that 40 to 70 percent of total time spent in IT projects is used for communication⁶.

This work tries to find the reasons for these communication problems and underlying
root causes. Based on these findings recommendations and fields of further research
will be developed.

1.1 Objectives and Observations

The main objectives are to find both chances and obstacles in corporate communication with the special case of the communication with the IT department.

It was the observation of the author that in environments where interpersonal relations where good between the IT department and the other departments, the level of cooperation and support seemed much higher than in an environment where many aspects of cooperation were formalized but interpersonal relations where not optimal.

1.2 Research Background

At the beginning of this work was the observation of the author, that sometimes even professionally managed IT projects fail to reach their objectives⁷ and at the same time environments which seemed chaotic could produce good results.

After the more obvious reasons like skills of the participants, tight resources etc. were ruled out, the focus fell on non-tentative reasons like the soft skills of the project participants.

The author was aware of some approaches to improve cooperation⁸ which sometimes seemed to work, and sometimes did not⁹.

1.3 Scope and Structure

The thesis will start with an explanation to the reader what the topic of research is, what method was chosen for research and what the focus and limitations of this work are.

Next a review of existing approaches to improve cooperation with the IT department (chapter 2) will follow. After that literature research (chapter 3), and the empirical study (chapter 4) will be presented.

The final part (chapter 5) will try to summarize the findings of the above mentioned chapters to build some tentative generalization of the findings and will also give ideas for further research.

[....]

1 Wendt, Gröne, 2003, (HPI), Potsdam, p.3, authors translation

2 Weill, MIS Quarterly Executive, Year. 3, Nr. 1, p. 53-68

3 „Internal IT Marketing is scarce, survey finds.“, Computerworld 24-Feb-2003

4 the same term e.g. ‘customer’ can mean completely different things for a programmer and a marketing employee.

5 http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/, 30-May-2005

6 Lutz Hoffmann, IBM Berlin 20-May-2005

7 see beginning of this chapter

8 see chapter 4

9 in the subjective perception of the author.