Calidad de la comunicación organizacional en las PYMEs industriales de la C.AP.V. según el grupo de estudio de los mandos

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the most firmly rooted kind of enterprise within the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country (A.C.B.C.) since they generate more than half of its GNP, its jobs, its revenue receipts and its exports, hence their interest.

The reason why managers from SMEs of the A.C.B.C. were chosen as the group of study was due to our appreciation of the comprehensive and objective view they could provide us with, as they are considered to be the backbone in any organization.

Optimizing the variable to be investigated, i.e. organizational communication, would redound to an improvement in productivity and, consequently, in competitiveness.

It was not until approximately 1950 that the academic field of organizational communication emerged as an identifiable entity, the first "Conference on Organizational Communication" being held in Alabama in August 1967.

During the process of literature and state of the art review on the topic, we realized that authors moved between difficult-to-put-into-practice generic theory and concrete, anecdotic practice, but without focusing on our aims, let alone the geographic area considered object of study.

The information sources utilized were fundamentally primary and they were obtained, on the one hand, from the "Catálogo Industrial Vasco. Euskadi 96" to get the sample of enterprises to be considered and, on the other hand, from the managers of industrial SMEs located within the A.C.B.C.

Since the "Catálogo" contained a strong potential of quantitative data about the SMEs, we opted for stratifying them according to the following boundaries:

Province Turnover Exports Size of A.C.B.C. (in millions of pesetas) (as a % of overall sales) (number of employees) A Araba 1 (250-500) X (<5%) S (20-50) B Bizkaia 2 (500-1000) Y (5%-50%) M (51-150) G Gipuzkoa3 (1000-5000) Z (50%-100%)

Following this procedure, a total of 740 SMEs were obtained and a sample of 222 was taken. A manager was selected at random from each of these SMEs and then chosen after accepting and commiting himself to answer a personally executable survey we forwarded to his place of work "a stamped envelope was sent, together with the survey, to facilitate the return of the answers".

Due to its versatility, power and speed, the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was utilized to process the data obtained from the questionnaires sent to the managers. These questionnaires consisted of 81 questions derived from 16 variables, being the latter grouped in three bands, that is:

1) circulation band of information/communication in the enterprise

2) agreement/organizational climate band in the enterprise

3) mentality/ability band of the managers

Among the overall conclusions reached, it is appropriate to underline the importance of the following fact: management culture with respect to organizational communication is more developed within the industrial SMEs of Araba than within those of Gipuzkoa and a lot more than within those of Bizkaia since most of the problems were detected in this province