Communications Patterns in Decision Making : Phenomenography Approach in Malaysia's and Indonesia's Political Organizations

Most of communication pattern and decision-making studies focused on corporate, social and business organization. Accordingly, it is necessary to continue the study of communication pattern and decision-making that focused on political organizations. The objective of this study was to obtain an understanding of the communication pattern and
the decision-making process in political organizations, in this case Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) of Malaysia and Parti Demokrasi Perjuangan (PDIP) of Indonesia. The research was designed as a qualitative research with a phenomenography approach within an interpretive paradigm. The phenomenography is an approach to reveal the variations in the ways activists in a political organization experience the organizational phenomena. Data were collected through interviews with leaders and members of both political parties. The data was analyzed through thematic analysis. The findings of this research suggest that both political parties applied downward communication patterns. PKR are also found to apply formal and informal communication patterns. The formal patterns consist of downward and upward communication. The more dominant one was downward communication, which was influenced by the members’ backgrounds and the challenges of the current political system. The informal pattern was dominated by grapevine and cross-channel communication. Meanwhile, the media for socialization is comprised of conventional and alternative media, with the latter predominantly used. Similarly, the formal communication pattern in PDIP was also dominated by downward communication while the informal one was dominated by grapevine. However, conventional media are utilized as the primary means of socialization. The finding of this study also highlights the decision-making process in PKR and PDIP, which considers three aspects; the dominant authority, experience, and context. The dominant authority became the main aspect in PKR’s decision-making process, while experience and contexts were undermined. The decision-making process in PDIP, on the other hand, emphasized experience and dominant authority, while context was undermined. This study significantly found that phenomenography is relevant approach for communication research in political organization. Furthermore, the phenomenography is potential to be developed in interpersonal communication researches. Findings of this study validated the phenomenography approach in understanding the organizational phenomena; in particular, the central role of communication pattern and decision making is empirically confirmed.