| Abstrakt: |
Four secondary schools in the metropolitan area of St. Louis County, contrasting in the degree of articulation of communication contacts among their teaching faculties, were chosen for testing two hypotheses: (a) the greater the articulation ("saturation") of staff contacts, the greater will be the diffusion of an item of information transmitted informally from the principal to teachers; and (b) the greater the number of communication contacts of a given staff member to whom information is transmitted by the principal, the greater will be the number of staff members to whom he will relay it. A message was fabricated by the investigators and, through the cooperation of high-school principals, transmitted in each school to three teachers, varying in the number of their communication contacts. Three days later, a questionnaire form was distributed to all teachers to measure the extent to which the in- formation had diffused among them and to discover from whom they had received the information. The experiment was repeated two weeks later with a different message. The results showed that, contrary to the first hypothesis, greater diffusion occurred in the low-saturation schools than in the high-saturation schools but, in accordance with the second hypothesis, the number of relays of information was a direct function of the input teacher's span of communication contacts. The investigators suggested that the incongruous findings could be explained if school differences in the degree of saturation of communication bonds were interpreted as reflecting the level of morale and, inversely, the extent of anxiety within the faculties. Low morale and high anxiety level constitute fertile conditions for rumor circulation. The investigators noted that processes of information flow may take on different characteristics in formal organization setting than in informal group settings. The role relationship between administrative officers and operating personnel may allocate to the former the legitimate and, perhaps, exclusive responsibility for the dissemination of work- related information, hence constraining the otherwise spontaneous circulation of information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
