Quali problemi di comunicazioni le organizzazioni debbono affrontare? Comunicazione implicita: realizzazione e prima validazione di un questionario per i diversi livelli delle organizzazioni dipendenti/dirigenti, pubblico/privato. Tentativo di costruzione di un modello con equazioni strutturali.

Within organizations the communication plays, owing to its nature, a fundamental role in all processes taking place through the coordination and the action of workers and managers in order to achieve specific goals, train and assess collaborators, share decisions and resolve conflicts. In recent times the organizations have been characterized by a change of the role played by communication. Namely this role, previously viewed as subsidiary, became structural and structuring the organizations themselves, so as to make the communication an index characterizing their quality and their health (Avallone, Paplomatas, 2005). Moreover, it has been possible to observe a transformation and unification of the old communicational paradigms (internal/external communication) in terms of integration of functions and globalization of recipients. Such transformations have been included and highlighted within a new communicational paradigm, introduced by Emanuele Invernizzi (Invernizzi, 2000), who defines the ‘Organizational communication’ as the set of strategic and operant processes of creation, exchange, and sharing of informational and value-transmitting messages, within the different networks of relationships which constitute the essence of the organization and of its place in the environment (Invernizzi, 2000). However such a paradigm deals only with the explicit and clear communication activities. Here a communication can be denoted as explicit if its content, the message, and the relationship underlying the communicational exchange are perspicuous, visible, quantifiable (Anolli, 2006). Our contribution tries to widen the domain of this analysis, so as to evidence the role played by the implicit component of a communication process, including the miscommunication, the occlusions, and the organizational silence. According to our opinion these phenomena actually occur within the organizational context and are associated with a precise logic and a specific operating mode. As regards the participants to the communicational exchange, these phenomena produce dissatisfaction, organizational and individual uneasiness. In other cases they are used to achieve dysfunctional relational goals, conscious or unconscious. Actually we lack a specific diagnostic tool allowing to detect within the organizations the presence of these domains (characterized by miscommunication, occlusions, and organizational silence), also because they are rarely taken into account by the existing literature. In order to evidence the occurrence of these phenomena and to understand how the latter are managed by the different components of the organizations themselves we introduced a new ad hoc tool for the organization diagnosis (two questionnaires), designed to investigate about the miscommunicational competence of both managers and workers belonging to both private and public enterprises. The same tool has been also designed to assess the status of the competence and sensitivity to these communication modalities. The data analyses done on two different samples (workers and managers) showed that these questionnaires have good psychometric features. This allows, taking even into account the novelty of this approach and the lack of validated tools in this domain, to use them as reliable diagnostic tools in order to assess the level of communicational knowledge and competence, including the miscommunication and silence phenomena.