This is the first in a series of papers to discuss the concept of organisational communication audit in its empirical appearances in the core organisational communication discipline and related communication disciplines, like communication management, corporate communication and public relations. The final goal is to make an overview of more than thirty years of research and propose an interdisciplinary approach to auditing organisational communication that would be as disciplined as the core auditing movement within the ICA was in the 1970s and as relevant to organisational realities as contemporary audits seem to be. The focus of investigation is the analysis of research instruments and their applications. The paper reviews the existing literature on organizational communication audits, primarily the four instruments - The Organizational Communication Questionnaire, The Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire, The Communication Audit Survey, and The Organizational Communication Audit Questionnaire. Comparison of organizational communication audit to a physical (health, medical) examination of a human body often used by authors on organizational communication audits exposes the paradigm within which they work (i.e., organizations as human bodies). Besides the mainstream academic communication research there is a multitude of more open, external- and process-oriented approaches to organizational communication audits, in particularly in the practice and academic communities denoting themselves with ‘public relations’, ‘corporate communication’, ‘communication management’, ‘reputation management’. After reviewing organizational communication audit literature and related suggestions for audits in communication management, corporate communication, public relations and reputation management literature, authors expose the proposed audit methodologies to contemporary body of knowledge on evaluation research in social sciences. Finally, the paper describes the development of an instrument crucial in the abovementioned context – an organizational communication satisfaction questionnaire. The development of the questionnaire went through two stages; the development of the original questionnaire with 107 items, administered to 259 respondents. On the basis of factor analyzed results, the original questionnaire was refined and reduced to its final form – a short (32 item) instrument applicable for future theoretical and practical work. The concept of multidimensionality of communication satisfaction was also confirmed and the analysis of dimensions showed interesting results, comparable to existing findings but still culturally specific.
