My Internship Experience As An Organizational Communication

My internship experience as a promotions/communication intern at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio was an outstanding experience that prepared me to utilize my skills, education and training in a professional environment. I had an incredible opportunity to be able to contribute my greatest strengths and assets to a one-of-a-kind nonprofit organization. I am going to discuss how my internship experience, through my daily practices, role and responsibilities, demonstrated an organizational communication theory.

The organizational communication theory that I will be discussing is Uncertainty Reduction Theory. I was debating between this theory, and Organizational Information Theory, which is the process of making sense of equivocal information in an organization. In my experience, I was able to observe how this organization’s members accomplished the sense-making process with the information that they had. I ultimately chose Uncertainty Reduction Theory to discuss because I believe that when any college student enters a new

This uncertainty usually stems from questioning new acquaintances in an attempt to gather information about them. From this point, information can then be used in attempts to predict the outcome of a new relationship with a person, or attempts to predict their behavior. The information-seeking process goes through expected developmental stages, signaling changes in the type of information (and quantity) shared between individuals. People are highly motivated, according to this theory, to use communication to reduce their uncertainty. This is done through verbal output, information seeking (done by asking questions) and self-disclosure. Self-disclosure encourages the other person to be more open, and reduces uncertainty but it does require vulnerability in the person disclosing information about