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71
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Introduction
Anu Sivunen is a Professor of Communication in the Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research focuses on organizational communication technology and social media, communication processes in virtual teams and in other distributed work settings, as well as organizational space.
Additional affiliations
January 2008 - April 2016
August 2002 - December 2007
Publications
Publications (71)
The concept of affordances has been increasingly applied to the study of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in organizational contexts. However, almost no research operationalizes affordances, limiting comparisons and programmatic research. This article briefly reviews conceptualizations and possibilities of affordances in general an...
Navigating organizational workspace is often plagued with tensions that emerge from the interplay of intended designs with organizational activities and lived experiences. These tensions are evident in research findings, such as inconsistencies in the ways that employees react to new workplace designs. They call on scholars to rethink organizationa...
This study investigates how boundary communication mediates the effects of smartphone use for work after hours on work-life conflict and organizational identification. It draws upon boundary theory, work-family border theory, and a structurational view of organizational identification. The research site was a large Scandinavian company operating in...
The past decade has experienced an increase in the number of studies on organizational space or where work occurs. A number of these studies challenge traditional views of organizational space as a fixed, physical workspace because researchers fail to account for the spatial dynamics that they observe. New technologies, shifting employee-employer r...
A massive shift towards remote work practices has presented many organizations and employees with acute challenges associated with multi-locational work. This shift underscores the need to reconsider isolation as one of the focal challenges of organizations in an era of increasingly dispersed and mediated work practices. This study relies on a thre...
Purpose
Enterprise social media (ESM) are expressive spaces where users exchange emotional workplace communication. While some studies have explored how positive emotions may be contagious, little research explored the notion that negative communication may accumulate on enterprise social media. This study explores perceived negativity bias and its...
The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication is a state-of-the-art resource for scholars, students, and practitioners seeking to deepen their understanding and expertise in this dynamic field.
Written by a global team of established and emerging experts, this Handbook provides a comprehensive exploration of the field’s...
This qualitative study delves into the impact of social media within a private elder care organisation, where its daily use was mandatory. It examines how care and care organizations take shape through the daily practices of care workers. Utilizing the concept of agency within the Communication Constituting Organisations framework (CCO) and its Fou...
Environmental changes can render latent organizational tensions salient, and tensions can be viewed as a lens through which to study the social interactions of organizational actors. This study aims to uncover what kinds of tensions and their entanglements arise in knowledge workers’ collaboration and technology-mediated communication practices dur...
Global workers have long contended with the challenges of working across geographical, temporal, and cultural boundaries enabled by communication technologies. However, the global work research has rarely intersected with the literature on work–home boundary management—which has been brought to the forefront due to the forced move to remote work du...
This study investigates the longitudinal relationship between after‐hour connectivity, autonomy and exhaustion. In doing so, we seek to illuminate the role of individuals' connectivity to work in relation to their autonomy and well‐being. We juxtapose different effective directions of the relationship between connectivity and autonomy to shed light...
Tässä artikkelissa tarkastellaan suomalaisten toimittajien ammatti-identiteettiin liittyviä käsityksiä sekä niiden merkitystä heidän työn ja muun elämän rajanhallinnalleen. Rajanhallinta määritellään vuorovaikutusprosessiksi, jossa työn ja muun elämän rajoista neuvotellaan. Lähestymme tutkimusaihetta laadullisen tutkimuksen menetelmin. Aineisto koo...
This study examines the longitudinal relationship between two affordances of organizational information and communication technologies (ICTs)—that is, visibility and persistence—and individuals’ subjective stress and technology-assisted supplemental work (TASW). We propose that visibility and persistence associated with organizational ICTs are ofte...
Purpose
The benefits associated with visibility in organizations depend on employees' willingness to engage with technologies that utilize visible communication and make communication visible to others. Without the participation of workers, enterprise social media have limited value. This study develops a framework to assess what deters and drives...
Purpose
This study aims to examine some of the benefits and drawbacks of communication visibility. Specifically, building on communication visibility theory, the authors study how and why message transparency and network translucence may increase knowledge reuse and perceived overload through behavioral responses of vicarious learning and technolog...
Organizations are increasingly adopting social technology platforms in an effort to support increased knowledge sharing among workers. Although scholarship has indicated that the use of social technologies can increase multiple forms of communication visibility within organizations, little is known about the nature of these relationships and how th...
Technological advancements have improved the capabilities of pedagogical agents to communicate with students. However, an increased use of pedagogical agents in learning environments calls for a deeper understanding of student–agent communication to assess the effectiveness of pedagogical agents in learning. This study is a two-phase systematic rev...
Erilaisten viestintäteknologioiden käytöllä on keskeinen rooli tietotyöntekijöiden arjessa. Erityisesti etätyössä, kun yhteydenpito tapahtuu pääosin teknologia välitteisesti, yksittäiset työntekijät ovat enenevässä määrin vastuussa siitä, missä, miten ja milloin työtä tehdään. Viestintäteknologioiden käyttö tuo mukanaan monia mahdollisuuksia, mut...
The global COVID-19 pandemic has led to numerous changes in society. This paper aims to understand how the abrupt transfer to remote work is reflected in employees' perceptions of relational communication at their work. Our research question is as follows: What kinds of perceptions and profiles regarding relational communication can be found among...
This study investigates the relationships between the use of various organizational ICTs, communication visibility, and perceived proximity to distant colleagues. In addition, this study examines the interplay between visibility and proximity, to determine whether visibility improves proximity, or vice versa. These relationships are tested in a glo...
This study investigates how the transition to remote work during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic is experienced by employees. We investigate to what extent perceived work stressors relate to psychological strain through perceptions of social support, work–life conflict, and adjustment to remote work. The findings expound the mechanisms underl...
Communicating work issues at home and home issues at work, also known as across-the-border (ATB) communication, is a part of everyday work and family interaction. This study focuses on the concept of ATB communication, using Work/Family Border Theory, according to which the boundaries between work and private life are seen as negotiated and shaped...
The COVID-19 crisis has disrupted when, where, and how employees work. Drawing on a sample of 5452 Finnish employees, this study explores the factors associated with employees’ abrupt adjustment to remote work. Specifically, this study examines structural factors (i.e., work independence and the clarity of job criteria), relational factors (i.e., i...
Supported by various collaboration technologies that allow communication from any place or time, employees increasingly engage in technology‐assisted supplemental work (TASW). Challenges associated with managing work and non‐work time have been further complicated by a global pandemic that has altered traditional work patterns and locations. To dat...
The global teams literature has increasingly documented challenges due to demographic faultlines. While this literature tends to assume that faultlines are fixed and produce negative outcomes for teams, organizational communication scholars have long regarded team processes as dynamic and fluid. Drawing on a CCO perspective, we offer a re-conceptua...
This qualitative study examines creativity and innovation in dispersed, journalistic teams. Specifically, we study the factors enabling and constraining creativity and innovation in journalistic work in technology-mediated settings and explore how technology shapes these phenomena in dispersed journalistic teams. The study is motivated by the media...
This study presents an analysis of the extent to which enterprise social media (ESM) use enhances visibility of content (message transparency) and connections (network translucence) in organizations, and how this affects knowledge brokering. The findings support the theory of communication visibility by demonstrating that ESM use is associated with...
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate the various enablers of and constraints on employees' information sharing on an enterprise social media platform. It draws on two theoretical perspectives, communication privacy management theory and the technology affordance framework, as well as on empirical data in an attempt to paint a compreh...
Various utopias and dystopias regarding the significance of human communication in the future workplace have been presented. Artificial intelligence (AI) will undoubtedly be one of the most remarkable influences on future work, and employees must prepare themselves to have social robots as coworkers. Partly as a result of the increased use of AI, v...
In this study, we present the findings from an inductive and interpretive case study of a founder-led online community (OC), exploring how members’ identification develops within the community over time. Using a longitudinal study of an OC that was founded by a reputable individual, it is shown that members were first attracted to the OC through th...
Uuden professorin juhlaluento, 7.12.2016, Jyväskylän yliopisto
While much is known about virtual team processes and outcomes, the literature relies on a variety of team configurations and types (including student versus organizational samples, short-term versus long-term teams, functional versus project-based teams, and teams with various task types) yet has not systematically examined how these differences im...
Global work is often organised around virtual meetings. Different time zones and schedules, plus competing priorities and roles, pose challenges for virtual team members. Social presence in a team does not automatically equate with physical or virtual presence. Therefore, the notions of being physically, virtually, and socially present or absent in...
Flexible work can take many forms, is facilitated by the widespread adoption of organizational information and communication technologies (ICTs), and can have many possible benefits and disadvantages. Perspectives of boundary theory, work-family border theory, and work-life balance are used to frame reviews of relevant research, generating a set of...
One of the key challenges of distributed teams is the lack of social presence resulting from multiple work locations. Virtual environments (VEs) have been viewed as a collaboration tool for distributed teams that can enhance social presence via shared collaboration space and avatars. We observed, recorded, and analyzed the VE meetings of a globally...
This article addresses the potential of virtual worlds as a platform for creative team collaboration. The proliferation of geographically distributed teams, striving towards innovative results, calls for ICT that support team creativity. Three-dimensional virtual worlds represent such an emergent and rapidly developing collaboration tool. A systema...
Research problem: Although much research exists on virtual worlds, very few studies focus on professional virtual worlds used for working in a global setting. Research questions: (1) How do global managers currently use and experience professional virtual worlds (Virtual Worlds) as a communication media for global work? and (2) How do these Virtual...
Virtual teams (VTs), collaborating through technology towards common goals, are a typical way of organizing work in global organizations. Collaborative technologies, such as 3D virtual worlds (VWs), make it possible for VTs to keep meetings in a shared virtual space. This study investigates VT leadership taking place in a VW. We analyzed VW meeting...
Virtual teams that work towards a common goal, are dispersed across many locations, and communicate through technology face several challenges in their operation. One of the key challenges is the lack of presence due to different work locations and time zones. 3D virtual environments (VEs) could be seen as a collaboration tool for virtual teams tha...
This article provides a review of previously published studies on virtual environments (VEs), focusing especially on empirical articles on social and group phenomena in VEs and their methodological and theoretical trends. VEs can be defined as communication systems in which interactants share the same three-dimensional digital space and can navigat...
Despite the increasing attention to multi-cultural collaboration, power in global distributed teams is hardly discussed in research. We used a qualitative, interpretive research method to study four multi-cultural teams from three globally distributed companies in the electronics and software industry in Asia, US, and Europe. Geographic distance hi...
Virtual team leaders have to face several challenges when leading a distributed team. In the literature on the communication of leaders, various features of competent communication practices have been presented, ranging from information seeking and networking skills to negotiating ability. However, the qualities needed in leading a virtual team hav...
The number of virtual teams is increasing in today's workplaces. In virtual teams, the members can have different cultural backgrounds, they often work in different countries and are professionals in their own fields. In addition, as such diverse and dispersed teams communicate mainly through communication technology this raises the challenge for t...
Virtual teams face challenges arising from geographical distance, cultural differences, and differing modes of interaction. Team leaders in particular face these challenges because they are primarily responsible for efficient team management. Technology choices made by leaders have become a focus of interest in communication studies, but questions...
This report consists of descriptions of methods, which are used for studying, evaluating and developing workplaces. Work environments are analyzed as layers or imbedded levels: as physical, virtual and mental/social spaces. In this analysis, Kurt Lewin's classical psychological concept 'Life Space' is used as well as the concept 'ba' provided by No...