“Contemporary communication practice” may sound rather esoteric, however it simply evaluates the effectiveness of “peer pressure’ within an organization. When evaluating what influences employees, it isn’t necessarily the organizations leaders that have the most impact.

“…today’s most effective communication managers also recognize the impact peers have on peers. Better still, organizations at the cutting edge of internal communication excellence not only recognize the value of peer influence, but also actively take advantage of it.”

The standard communication model recognized today is the “loop” or communication – information delivery and feedback -that is upward, downward and through the organization. The CCP theory posits that these vertical loops are not necessarily representative of how information flow occurs. A better model is one of a series of horizontal loops.

“The problem is that organizations don’t work smoothly like a single, vertical loop. The typical organization is actually a complex series of horizontal loops. These horizontal loops represent peer groups — the mail room, the plant down the road, the computer programmers, employees with less than two years’ service, female employees, the sweepers on the second shift or the Haitians whose English is a second language.

In large organizations, the array of peer groups is incredibly complex. A peer opinion leader, or more than one, exists in each. Some peer opinion leaders (the female computer programmer from the plant down the road, for example) may exert influence across several loops.

CCP identifies the “peer opinion leaders’ as they appear throughout the organization, which could be anywhere. They can be enthusiasts or they can be those that bad mouth the organization.

“Most organizations today are populated with people who privately or openly distrust their company’s next move. Rather than dismissing this reality and ramming more white-knuckled decisions down employees’ throats, contemporary communicators are helping senior managers see how to use the CCP model to improve buy-in, even from cynical audiences.”
(Source)