Impact Analysis of Unified Communications on Managers’ Verbal Communication and Organizational Form

In this study the verbal communication behavior of managers in Europe and the United States of America, how bureaucratic or adhocratic their work environments were, and their use of Unified Communications (UC) were analyzed. Accounting for over one-third of an organization’s payroll, management is a costly and powerful resource with the scope and ramifications of a manager’s decision, also a competitive factor. The underlying theories were Wittkewitz’s statement that middle-managers spend two-thirds of their time with verbal communication and social software could shift this management task to subordinates. Resulting either in more time for important management tasks, like proactive strategic planning, or be reassigned to more productive work, rendering the middle-management tier surplus. The use of UC might be facilitating a transition to an organizational form that is better suited for the business environment of the twenty-first century, like adhocracy. Because current and future organizations are globally interconnected, UC might have significant effects on the management of virtual teams across diverse cultural locations. Linear regression was used to analyze the data in this non-experimental correlational design. The results showed managers spent, on average, more than 50% of their time with verbal communication, that companies were in the transition from bureaucracy to adhocracy, and supervisors led this transition.