ABSTRACT

C OMMUNICATION processes between superiors and subordi-nates have been of interest to social scientists for severaldecades, as Jablin's (1979) review documents well. This is not surprising, given that managers spend between one-third and two-thirds of their time communicating with subordinates (Porter & Roberts, 1976). One aspect of vertical dyadic communication that has sparked considerable interest is the distortion of messages passed upward in the organizational hierarchy. Distortion is the process of modifying messages transmitted to receivers (Campbell, 1958). Distortion is an important problem in organizations because modifications to messages cause misdirectives to be transmitted, nondirectives to be issued, incorrect information to be passed on, and a variety of other problems related to both the quantity and quality of information (Goldhaber, Yates, Porter, & Lesniak, 1978).