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Publications (93)
This forum joins communication researchers who explore high reliability organizations (HROs) and teams to discuss the communicative foundations of HRO. We argue that organizational communication researchers can make meaningful contributions to present challenges in HRO research. These challenges include (1) HRO’s focus on organizations versus proce...
The pandemic was a prolonged and ongoing work disruption, especially for professional caregivers. This explanatory sequential mixed method study revealed that caregivers’ communicative resilience (CR) was positively associated with their experience of flourishing and negatively associated with burnout and intentions to turnover—indicating that CR i...
Imagined interactions (IIs) are conversational daydreams communicators can use to envision how interactions might unfold prospectively or how they might have unfolded differently in retrospect. In this study, imagined interactions with the boss (IIB) were investigated alongside employees’ upward dissent and silence. Analyses of survey responses fro...
Agency describes a set of assumptions held by social theorists about the source and story of social reality. Those assumptions matter to computer-mediated communication (CMC) theorizing because they answer for researchers where the (real) action is and who is capable of acting. Assumptions regarding agency direct researchers’ attention, often unint...
This paper used communication theory of resilience (CTR) and high-reliability organization (HRO) theory to investigate the influence of resilience processes on disruption management outcomes (DMOs) at both the individual and team levels and at two points in time. Perceptions of individual and team stress, efficacy, and performance were examined lon...
This paper reports on the development and validation of a communication measure designed to assess how military veterans feel toward civilian communication. Specifically, we theorize that some veterans experience a mild negative moral emotion (i.e., contempt) toward civilians' communication habits. The emotion is likely a consequence of intense pro...
This study investigated dissent strategy selection as a product of structurational divergence (SD) and individuals’ lay theories of leader and follower roles. A survey of working adults ( N = 338) revealed that employees who reported experiencing structurational divergence in their workplace were more likely to engage in circumvention, threatening...
High reliability team (HRT) theorizing emerged from high reliability organization (HRO) theory and now represents a distinct subset of HRO literature. Seeking to capture the development and range of HRT research, a comprehensive literature review was conducted. This systematic review of HRT scholarship, the first of its kind, provides a foundation...
This study investigated a key question involved with attracting and retaining a diverse workforce: Should recruiters provide race-related realistic organizational previews (ROPs) to job candidates from historically-marginalized groups during the offer consideration phase? Colorblind (i.e., race ignoring) socialization practices are likely motivated...
How and when do employees confront one another for stealing their ideas? Business communication literature on confronting unethical behavior is synthesized with moral licensing theory to better understand responses to unethical actors about unjustified credit taking in the workplace. In this message production experiment, working adults ( N = 344)...
The body of qualitative research on teams has grown considerably in the last few decades – yet no accumulation or analysis of this body of research exists, despite the development of a method to do so. Meta-synthesis represents a set of methods used to accumulate and analyze qualitative research in a systematic and rigorous way. A total of 74 artic...
Communication serves a constitutive force in making organizations what they are. While communication can be viewed as merely occurring “within” the organization, communication itself is essential to the creation and maintenance of organizations. Modern research in organizational communication explores this constitutive force of communication as wel...
This study explores how a high-reliability team (HRT) employed an informal communication norm to facilitate access to members’ distributed expertise during forecast decisions, despite time pressures. The communication norm was documented during observations of U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) forecast team members’ naturalistic decision making (...
This project explores how team resilience enacted in the work domain shapes and is shaped by resilience practices in the non-work domain – a process we label, domain diffusion of resilience. Weather forecasters’ team, organizational, and professional work give rise to a resilient mentality, which then tends to manifest in their own non-work context...
A challenging part of many occupations is dealing with negative emotions from customers, coworkers and other communication partners on a daily basis. This paper describes a case-based, inductive study of information technology (IT) help-desk workers within a Fortune 500 energy company and the communication media and emotion regulation strategies (E...
Virtual spaces are a new and influential means by which present and past organizational members share reviews of their organizational experiences and socialize potential newcomers. This investigation employed social identity theory and uncertainty management theory as a means of explaining patterned user ratings of organizational reviews online. In...
Virtual spaces are a new and influential means by which present and past organizational members share reviews of their organizational experiences and socialize potential newcomers; however, online reviews can be negative and jeopardize an organization’s image. This investigation employed social identity theory and uncertainty management theory as a...
This case study documents how an academic team of mathematicians engaged in collective communication design work (CCDW) in order to improve how they communicated a process innovation to student stakeholders. The study, supported by interviews and observations, explains how team members worked together to develop structural and verbal strategies for...
Case study remains a foundation of past and present organizational communication scholarship. In this article, we show the value of supplementing traditional case-selection methods with positive deviance case selection (PDCS). PDCS is about identifying and investigating individuals, teams, and organizations whose communication is intentional, nonno...
This study documents the use of humor in an instructional setting outside traditional classrooms. Specifically, it studied the use of instructional humor in training elite and aspiring gymnasts. Analysis of practice recordings, firsthand observations, and interviews with coaches, staff members, athletes and their guardians, revealed that coaches em...
Some events are so important and transformative that it is valuable to understand what led to the event so others may potentially reproduce it. But making claims from single cases has to be done carefully. This paper explains how to draw useful claims out of unique and inspiring cases. It reviews the methodological strategies that drove a case stud...
This study describes how overlapping sources of identification allow
organizational members to resist managerial influence collectively in the absence of overt talk or leadership communication – labeled here
concertive resistance. Concertive resistance is exercised by organizational members according to a set of core group-level values which challe...
This article demonstrates that when supervisors encourage subordinates to defer to their embodied expertise, subordinates are more likely to voice explicitly moralized upward dissent to an unethical business request. Working adults (N = 312) were randomly assigned to respond to an unethical business request from their boss in one of three scenarios...
An essential piece of anesthesiologist training is attending resident feedback sessions. Yet, few attending anesthesiologists have formal teaching education and little time to acquire it. In this field experiment, attending physicians were randomly assigned to a control group or to receive 30 minutes of feedback training inspired by Implicit Person...
This paper extends Four Flows theory by showing how its agency-related assumptions can explain the role played by materials in the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO). Analysis of Dabiq – the propaganda periodical of ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) – illustrates how members of the complex organization engaged in activity c...
Extensive work in psychology and neuroscience reveals that individuals are born with moral intuitions, and this volume capitalizes on that recent insight to provide a new perspective on how to lead organizational ethics. Organizational Moral Learning presents communication-based recommendations for managers and leaders to encourage authentic moral...
This ethnographic study describes how authority figures may unwittingly invite and co-create a team’s collective resistance in response to their actions. The study documents two pivotal organizational communication episodes experienced by two separate teams within a Collegiate Division I Athletic Department. A positioning analysis of the episodes r...
Post-positivism is a label for a set of research assumptions that underlie some organizational communication scholarship. Post-positivistic assumptions entail beliefs about reality, knowledge, and value in research. Ontology, or the philosophical study of being and reality, is one way to describe the unique assumptions of post-positivism. Post-posi...
Distortion – the interference with or alteration of a message – is a way of describing undesirable disruptions to a message as it moves from organizational member to organizational member. Contemporary organizational communication research investigates how ordinary features of everyday talk, like equivocation, can result in intentional and unintent...
Quantitative methods refer to the systematic collection and analysis of numerically expressed data. While quantitative methods are less common in contemporary organizational communication than qualitative methods, quantitative methods are no less important in producing new knowledge in the field of study. The entry presents an overview of quantitat...
This organizational life history documents how the founder of an elite gymnastics training organization led her organizational members to resist what she deemed to be unethical institutional influences prior to working toward changing those institutional practices. The study contributes the idea that institutional resistance leadership at the team...
This case study explains how coworkers socially constructed a hierarchy of prestige within their department. Analysis of interviews with academic physicians revealed participants engaged in identity work by deprecating colleagues’ efforts, while making sense of their own and their subgroups’ contributions defensively. The organizational discourse p...
A two-part investigation explored whether strategic messaging can influence others’ perceptions of one’s organizational citizenship. In a first study, inductive analysis of interviews (N = 24) revealed working adults hold implicit rules for how (and how not) to present themselves to their colleagues as good citizens: The rules require organizationa...
This message-production experiment demonstrates that supervisors can mitigate the workplace moral mum effect and encourage upward ethical dissent by talking about ethics with subordinates (i.e., moral talk contagion). Working adults (N = 324) were randomly assigned to respond to an unethical request by their supervisor in one of five scenarios that...
Have cable news networks used the titles “President” and “Mr.” differently when referring to Barack Obama than when referring to George W. Bush? Content analysis of 140 cable news transcripts from the first 100 days of each presidency shows Fox News used honorifics similarly when referring to each president, but CNN was significantly more likely to...
The forum guest editor Ryan Bisel in this issue takes on the topic of big data and presents a round table that grew out of a conference panel. Five scholars engage in a discussion of the social and cultural trend of big data and implications to qualitative organizational communication research. The contributors respond to questions and delve into a...
This language production experiment investigates communication’s role in defending, and therefore giving sense to, organizational wrongdoing. The study suggests identification may possibly reduce organizations’ moral learning capacity by encouraging highly identified members to engage in ethical sensegiving of their organizations’ wrongdoing in def...
In this case study, we report how a team of firefighters critiqued one of its member’s decisions to facilitate learning and process improvement. The study is supported by 500+ hr of ethnographic observations, documents, and 11 retrospective interviews, which captured how the team’s talk about the member’s decision shaped their interpretations of th...
This message-production experiment demonstrates workers' tendency to use organizational policy justifications when publicly denying what they privately believe are unethical requests. Working adults (N = 234) responded to an unethical request from a supervisor, coworker, or subordinate. Participants avoided using explicitly moralized justifications...
This investigation supplements Leader–Member Exchange (LMX) theory by explaining how leaders make sense of whether and when to trust members throughout role negotiations. This conceptualization of leaders' trust of members describes how leaders emplot members in storylines characterized as predictably good, unpredictable, or predictably bad, and ca...
We synthesize the interdisciplinary literature into a heuristic for crafting effective organizational and supervisory apologies (the OOPS four-component apology). In the first experiment, we demonstrate how an offense committed by an organization is perceived to be more egregious than an offense committed by a friend or supervisor. Furthermore, res...
This article offers reflections and insights on Management Communication Quarterly from a younger scholar in the field of organizational communication. After providing a brief history of the journal, topics of internationality, interdisciplinarity, and identity are explored. This is followed by a discussion among other “emerging scholars” in the fi...
This study presents a sensemaking-resource model of employee silence. Working adults (N = 180) provided retrospective accounts of a decision to refrain from giving upward negative feedback. Constant comparative analysis revealed workers justified their silence as a reasonable course of action by drawing on 2 sensemaking resources: expectation and i...
The authors provide nine propositions regarding the function and effects of supervisor-subordinate communication to encourage business communication researchers to go beyond a unidimensional view of this workplace relationship. Taken together, these propositions represent an argument that connects and clarifies the associations between micro-level...
In this language production experiment, working adults (N = 226) were asked to respond to unethical business requests. Our objective was to advance a communicative understanding of unethical organizational behaviors by analyzing the linguistic adjustments workers employ to deny unethical requests. Specifically, we measured responses to unethical re...
Through this language production experiment, we demonstrate workers' tendency to avoid describing behavior in ethical terms—what we label the moral mum effect. Working adults (N = 195) responded to an unethical request from a supervisor, coworker, or subordinate. Content and contingency table analyses revealed that most workers did not label the un...
This study uses discursive positioning theory to explore how planned change messages influence organizational members’ identity and the way they experienced organizational change. Based on an in-depth case study of a home healthcare and hospice organization that engaged in a multiyear planned change process, our analysis suggests that workers exper...
Rephrasing the forum question to oHow can we ensure communication research has a positive effect on communication practice?o focuses on the present, points to a specific purpose for communication research, emphasizes the scope and type of difference to be made, and places accountability and responsibility on researchers. In general, the public has...
Writing as an organizational communication scholar, I provide a brief description and history of theories encapsulated by the phrase communication is constitutive of organizing (CCO). Then, I explain that CCO theory would benefit from an explicit differentiation between which conditions are prerequisite to and which conditions ensure the constituti...
To fill a critical void in organizational culture pedagogy, the authors present an instructional system that employs the metaphor of a gyroscope to help students understand implicit assumptions in culture research. Working from Martin's nexus approach to organizational culture and Fairhurst and Putnam's tripartite theory of organizational discourse...
We join the ORGanic conversation by introducing our throughput-based approach to evaluating organizational training. Our investigation of organizational training is organic in two senses. First, organic describes how fundamental elements in nature relate in dynamic interconnections and constitute the very substance of life itself. We argue that org...
Applied research, especially in the communication discipline, has been met with resistance and criticism by some who advocate adherence to theoretically-based research. This dilemma is exacerbated by ongoing debates among applied scholars about how to define applied research and how to conceptualize its relationship to theory development. Definitio...
Objective: To identify and differentiate among three communication perspectives in organizational culture research
Courses: Organizational Communication, Communication in the Workplace, Organizational Culture and Change
Duality arguments are now a common perspective employed in organizational discourse research to avoid the problematic dualism of necessarily prioritizing structure or agency. Despite this considerable philosophical maturity, not all duality approaches are created equal. In fact, duality theorizing in current organizational discourse research has de...
In this essay, we explain the function and forms of prophetic Western end-time narratives that take a violent turn. We begin by describing how relatively benign end-time stories function for their adherents by analyzing the book of Daniel. Then, we analyze the end-time prophecy of David Koresh at the height of federal law enforcement pressure on hi...
This study examined decision making by members of a volunteer organization as a duality of unobtrusive control and resistance. A central premise of the organization—the need for aggressive economic development—was isolated from field observations of the organization's meetings. Grounded theory analysis of interviews with organizational alumni revea...
This dissertation theoretically characterized and empirically tested the theory that organization arises from within communication. Each chapter is interconnected but written as an independent research report. Organizational discourse research is mature in the sense that much research on talk in the workplace is increasingly similar in its view of...
