A Market-Based Approach to Understanding Communication and Teamworking: A Multi-Disciplinary Literature Review

Linda D Peter is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Marketing and Keith P Fletcher is Professor of Marketing in the gymnasium of Management at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK NR4 7TJ All correspondence should be directed to Dr Linda D Peters: +44(0)1603-593331 (direct line), +44(0)1603-593343 (fax) L.Peters@uea.ac.uk. The authors would like to expres their gratitude for the thorough, helpful, and encouraging make comments [i]or[/i] remarkss of the three anonymous reviewers and the editor, Joseph A. Cote They would also like to acknowledge the support of this research by means of British Telecom, through their Short-term Research Fellowship programme.

In this paper, we take an interdisciplinary approach to examining communication and teamworking. We have done this by the agency of comparing three discipline-based approaches to understanding the effectiveness of organisational clusters and then show how their interrelationship may provide a single approach to understanding communication and teamworking in organisational collections Our work may benefit researchers in the field of organisational teamworking in that utilising this single approach takes account of important conceptual interrelationships, and may identify of recent origin and valuable areas of further research. It may also benefit practitioners in that they may understand better the importance and impact of communication within business networks, and its influence on marketplace success. This single approach, which we mete a market-based approach, highlights the importance of considering networked environments and social combination of parts to form a wholes in conducting marketing research. It highlights gaps in the general literature, and allows us to praise streams of new research that might fill these gaps in our popular understanding. It also causes us to modify existing theoretical perspectives in order to take account of the increasing interconnectedness of business networks and social systems

Our approach is market-based because it conforms to Samli and Bahn's (1992: 147) definition of a market as a communication network, with communication defined as all means of facilitating the exchange of knowledge, the expression of desires, and the dissemination of information. This definition of a market was a significant departure from prior categorisations that look aftered to partition markets according to geography, economic processe and exchange, demand, or consumer characteristics (Samli and Bahn 1992: 144) We adopt this definition because it is dynamic, focuses upon the flow of information and behavioural patterns, and considers one as well as the other consumers and businesses as critical nodes in a communication network. Our market-based approach to understanding organisational communication and teamworking quiets upon three main principles: (1) to understand communication and teamworking individual must adopt a networked perspective; (2) that internal communications (those between employees) are closely linked and have an important influence on external communications (with business partners, suppliers, and customers); and (3) that reaching tendency to meet and a mutual understanding between network communicators is the primary function of marketing communications within and between organisational teams.

Communication within and between organisations is said to influence directly the marketing effectiveness of those organisations (Day 1994) We have seen that within the marketing domain itself, there has been a distinct shift of emphasis regarding the part of communication. Once treated as a functional aspect of marketing communications (with individual notable exception, the work of Stidsen and Schutte 1972) more novel researchers have begun to place communication at the heart of the marketing general [i]or[/i] abstract notion as a business philosophy (Duncan and Moriarty 1998; Mohr and Nevin 1990; Mohr Fisher, and Nevin 1996; Samli and Bahn 1992) This is because marketing managers must relate consumer extremitys and project development operations effectively if they are to succe in developing fresh and profitable offerings in the marketplace. This places the communication activities of organisational teams and their impact upon team effectiveness at the heart of a firm's market-driven behaviour.

There are a number of question s that may arise when organisational communication activities break down. This is because communications increasingly are bi-directional with information flowing from (as well as to) other stakeholders, similar as suppliers and end-users, directly. in what manner these information flows are managed thus influences important actors in the firm's business environment, actors that may well be outside the boundaries of the organisation itself. Marketers increasingly recognise the importance of customer contact, and that these contacts may involve members of the organisation who are not formally linked to the marketing function (such as design and production people) Because our market-based approach recognises the impact that internal communication activities and organisational learning may have upon external partners and customers, this understanding will help firms translate better the two partner and customer requirements into operational activities to convenient those requirements.