degree of agreement over the details of the subordinate's tasks.

degree of agreement over the details of the subordinate's tasks. The results showed that in many ways the communication gaps among managers were often considerably wider than with the more routine positions
.they controlled. Only on the topic of job duties did the pairs show more agreement than disagreement. More typically, on the important area of the subordinates' work problems, the pattern was reversed. These results occurred despite the fact that all four companies involved had written job descriptions and that two of the companies had performance appraisal programmes. These results indicate that communication failures are not limited to periods of major organizational change but can be an every-day occurrence. Furthermore, these failures seem to occur at
all levels of the organization and in a variety of contexts.

Distance
One major cause of these breakdowns is the underestimation of the effects of technical limitations on communication. Research in the forties by Allport and Postman considering distance in terms of the number of links involved in a communication act, proved the commonly held belief that rumours tend to become more inaccurate as the number of links increases-each link liable to produce some distortion. Soon after, Zipf went on to show that physical distance can also reduce the quantity of communication between two locations. He found that the number of long-distance telephone calls between pairs of cities was directly proportional to their populations but inversely proportional to the distance between them. Although cost is a likely factor, it seems reasonable to assume that the exu'a time involved in connecting distant callers is another factor reducing communication quantity over longer distances. The work