Balancing Creativity and Constraint defines strategic ambiguity

Balancing Creativity and Constraint defines strategic ambiguity

Organizational Communication: Balancing Creativity and Constraint defines strategic ambiguity as, “an important concept that describes the ways in which people may communicate unclearly but still accomplish their goals” (Eisenberg, Goodall & Trethewey, 2010, p. 30). However, in my opinion, to put it simply, strategic ambiguity is choosing your words wisely in order to promote harmony. Due to this I often see strategic ambiguity being put to use during group projects or tasks. An example of this would be the group tasks which I participated in in my Intercultural Communications class on Tuesday. Our teacher asked us to get into a group of four and handed us a bad containing different building materials and a deck of cards, she then told us to build a house of cards using the supplies that were within the bag and the most aesthetically pleasing would receive five additional points onto their test scores. Upon looking at the supplies one of the girls in my group stated an idea that I did not like. Instead of being brutally honest, I utilized strategic ambiguity. Within this paper I will describe this example of strategic ambiguity, discuss how this example could be interpreted in different ways, and analyze the integrity and ethical implications of the given example.

Upon opening our bag to see which supplies we were given to work towards achieving our goal of producing the most aesthetically pleasing house of cards, I knew that the task at hand would be much harder than expected. In the bag that our group received we were given two glue sticks and what we later came to find out was only two-thirds of a deck of cards. In order to create the most aesthetically pleasing house we knew that we would need to be innovative; therefore we began to spew out the ideas which came to mind. One of the girls in my group spewed out the idea that we should rip the cards and glue them together in order to give the house more height. What the girl f…