Organizational Information Asymmetry, Media Sociability and Structural Design

Abstract

In addition to the objectives of uncertainty reduction and equivocality reduction most often studied in research on organizational information processing, I will argue that organizations process information in order to resolve and even to generate asymmetric information environments. These asymmetric objectives can lead to organizational information structures completely opposite those anticipated by information richness theory. This capacity to not only invert the expected relationship between environment and media richness, but also alter the apparent richness of a medium, is the result of the relative sociability of an information environment in use within the organization. The sociability of a medium is defined as the relative ease with which participants might extend, alter, evolve, amalgamate and orient that particular information environment. Managers can design information environments with sociability in mind, enabling organizational actors to collectively contribute to a medium, optimizing a particular mix of social cues, facts, feedback, language and diverse channels for not only effective, but also mutual understanding.