Networked Miscommunication: The Relationship Between Communication Networks, Misunderstandings, and Organizational Performance

Abstract

In this dissertation, I introduce and define the concept of networked miscommunication – unintentional, aggregated effects of communication practices throughout an organization – and demonstrate its deleterious impacts on organizational performance through case studies and models. While “miscommunication” features prominently in accounts of high-profile complex system accidents, researchers have yet to demonstrate how communicative misunderstandings degrade organizational performance more generally.

I show that while miscommunication costs can result from misunderstandings distributed throughout an organization’s communication networks, they also arise whenever a networked communicative interaction falls short of a desired organizational outcome. In my framework, miscommunication is not merely mistakes; practitioners can also be strategically ambiguous. Competitive environments make strategic ambiguity more likely than do cooperative organizational cultures. I therefore hypothesize that fostering cooperation over competition can improve organizational performance while also increasing equity.

I begin by exploring the responsibilities organizations bear as they develop, operate, and manage the complex systems that pervade modern society – whether those systems involve manufacturing, healthcare, or finance. Complex systems contain large collections of highly interacting, tightly coupled elements, making them susceptible to “normal accidents” such as Three Mile Island (Perrow, 1981, 2011). Organizations that suppress dissent, as was the case with the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, will be more prone to these accidents (Vaughan, 1997). More recently, the 2018 Hawaii Ballistic Missile False Alarm highlights how misunderstandings in organizational communication networks affect complex system performance and hence organizational performance. This last type of failure is the primary focus of this dissertation.

After a review of the literature on communication and miscommunication, I dually define miscommunication: pragmatically as communication problems that negatively affect goal attainment, and integratively as misunderstandings that prevent participants from balancing their values. I then define networked miscommunication and present three studies that I use to identify a surprising and impactful type of unintentional communicative misunderstandings concerning the meaning of the term “estimates.” I demonstrate how heterogeneous meanings of the word estimate both do and don’t affect organizational performance.

My first study reveals that expert practicing engineers use cognitive heuristics and strategic ambiguity to shape estimates of their designs. I then demonstrate how these behaviors increase system uncertainty via an Agent-Based Model and Monte Carlo simulation (Meluso & Austin-Breneman, 2018). To understand the strategic uses of estimates, I study a Fortune 500 company and find widespread variation among practicing engineers about what an “estimate” means independent of their division, title, and phase of product development. While some practitioners define estimates as approximations of current designs, others define them as approximations of future designs, points in a project which could be years apart. Importantly, engineers inadvertently aggregate estimates of different types into single values that inform programmatic decision-making, thereby constituting networked miscommunication (Meluso et al., 2020).

The third study, however, reveals a nuanced picture in which varied estimate definitions conditionally degrade organizational performance. In particular, future estimates degrade complex system performance relative to current estimates, constituting networked miscommunication despite a lack of misunderstandings. I also find that some misunderstandings can protect an organization from performance degradation. In organizations with equal use of current and future estimates, current estimates buffer systems against degradation caused by future estimates, indicating that performance degradation depends on communication network structure (Meluso et al., 2019). Collectively, these studies demonstrate the potential of networked miscommunication to affect organizational performance.