In places where information travels freely through open channels, organizations can sift, verify, and select information for business goals. Where information is restricted and access is not open, organizations rely more heavily on informal sources. Where in-formation is withheld from workers and only made available in limited supply, workers rely on the organizational grapevine — the informal network. The grapevine flourishes where formal, official information is limited. The secretary to the president, someone in the mail room, a good friend of a relative of the chairperson, a confidant of the director — these are the kinds of sources with the greatest credibility in an informal net-work. Informal Internet sources also have greater credibility when they are known per-sons or entities.
People from open-information cultures who are used to formal sources that offer reliable and accurate information tend not to place much value on factual information that comes from informal sources. For example, a German-Swiss firm may disregard sources’ opinions about the prospects of success for a proposal to raise the price of a service in Japan. But informal sources of information may be much better at reading the context than foreigners are, and informal information may be more accurate than the official version. Internet sources and informal personal e-mail contacts have made in-formal information much more important than it was only a decade ago. Within some companies instant messenger (IM) services such as AOL Messenger, MSN Messenger, and ICQ provide fast electronic connections to facilitate informal interoffice communications.
In some cultural environments unofficial spokespersons, unsigned newspaper articles, and references in an organization’s internal documents can be reliable sources. They not only provide data but also interpret the data, and interpretation means putting the in-formation in context.