6.3  Conclusion
Globalization, competition, technological sophistication and speed have increased the complexity of organizations. If, indeed, organizations thrive on communication, then clearly, communication should enable them to cope with such complexity. The information systems field can, and indeed must, play a role in enabling effective communication, but for this, such a field needs to inform the design of information technology on the basis of a realistic model. The proposed model has sought to draw a balance between relationship and action, cognition and affect, message and medium. As noted in the introduction, we believe that such a balanced view provides a more realistic view of organizational communication and avoids possible pitfalls in prescriptions, e.g., minimize communication by disregarding the need for building relationship. Underlying this approach is the realization that we are facing new forms of communication and new forms of organizations (Fulk and DeSanctis, 1995).
It is important to invent new designs that are able to support new forms of communication, but it is essential that this should be done only on the basis of a better understanding of what needs to be accomplished. In this paper, an attempt has been made to achieve such an understanding by abstracting patterns of current behavior, rather than simply by speculating on what can be done with emerging technologies, such as virtual reality. Computer-mediated communication has been described as a different state of communication, which "may change the psychology and sociology of the communication process itself & [creating] a new linguistic entity with its own vocabulary, syntax and pragmatics"(Rice and Love, 1987, p. 86). In order to direct the new communication process, however, it is necessary to understand the way people choose to behave. Only then will it be possible to design support that is more relevant to actual communication behavior. Furthermore, it is time to reconsider the metaphor of lean-rich media, which climaxes with face-to-face communication. Intelligent communication support systems may be better thought of as providers of optimal levels of interactivity, channel capacity and adaptiveness in conjunction with recommendations of optimal message form. At the same time, however, it is important to note two caveats. One is the simplified view of organizational communication adopted here in which organizational politics are ignored. Organizational games in which communication is a medium of power may certainly distort the behavior described above (Frost, 1987). Secondly, technology not only facilitates communication but also creates new realities that may trigger unproductive communication behavior (Spears et al., 1990; Sproull and Kiesler, 1992). We may, for example, learn to rely on machine for relating to other people instead of learning how to relate (McLeod, 1999). Thus, the rather optimistic view of technology should be taken with a grain of salt. In fact, under certain conditions it may be more effective to train people how to communicate rather than delegate communication to machines.
Enterprises of the future are likely to rely even more heavily on virtual organization. Trust will be crucial. At the same time, however, they may find it more difficult to develop trust between people who hardly ever meet (Handy, 1995). Thus, communication is expected to play a growing role in promoting not only task-oriented goals, but also relationship-oriented ones. In this respect, we believe that increasingly, organizations will need to design communication support systems based on cognitive and affective models in order to facilitate better operations and working relationships within such virtual organizations.