Group items tagged

The command-and-control approach to management has in recent years become less and less viable. Globalization, new technologies, and changes in how companies create value and interact with customers have sharply reduced the efficacy of a purely directive, top-down model of leadership. What will take the place of that model? Part of the answer lies in how leaders manage communication within their organizations—that is, how they handle the flow of information to, from, and among their employees. Traditional corporate communication must give way to a process that is more dynamic and more sophisticated. Most important, that process must be conversational.

One's colleagues can be situated in close physical proximity, yet seem quite distant. Conversely, one's colleagues can be quite far away in objective terms, yet seem quite close. In this paper, we explore this paradoxical phenomenon of feeling close to geographically distant colleagues and propose a model of perceived proximity (a dyadic and asymmetric construct which reflects one person's perception of how close or how far another person is). The model shows how communication and social identification processes, as well as certain individual and socio-organizational factors, affect feelings of proximity.