No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Communication Policies
Abstract
From an organizational communication perspective, policy is defined as an organization's formal statement of beliefs on issues or approved courses of action on matters of importance, and usually is set forth by senior management. Policy is a significant organizational communication issue as it plays an enduring and powerful role in the contemporary workplace. Three topical areas of communication policy scholarship are addressed in this entry: destructive organizational communication, employee work–life integration, and information and communication technologies.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
With the increase in the use of mobile devices in the workplace, both employer supplied and personally owned, and the major role social media has begun to play in today’s world, businesses face many new challenges with their employees. Social media may be seen by some employers as a virtual Pandora’s Box. Though it may seem to hold bountiful riches, employee posts can unleash a firestorm of unforeseen challenges and consequences ranging from financial, to legal, to ethical. In looking at business use of social media, this article will discuss the prevalence of social media use, possible legal liabilities thereof, and policies to consider.
This article reports a review of empirical research on policy, organizations, and communication. Ninety-nine articles were coded in four emergent research themes that included constitutive topics: (1) framing, with process and perceptions; (2) identity management, with organizational identity and individual identity; (3) multiple stakeholder decision-making, with structure/process and voice/power; and (4) contradictions, with intrasystem and intersystem contradictions. The discussion offers implications for research and practice.
Software that enables sophisticated and comprehensive electronic surveillance of employee Internet access is widely used by American businesses. No federal or state statute prohibits private employers from monitoring their employees' email or the websites they access. Corporate managers opt for surveillance to protect their corporations from legal exposure arising from employee misconduct, such as downloading or emailing pornographic material; to protect against the improper disclosure of proprietary information over the Internet; and because surveillance software is inexpensive. While the reasons offered by employers for conducting electronic surveillance may be valid, there are competing considerations. This paper reviews surveillance technologies, discusses arguments for utilizing electronic surveillance, and concludes with legal issues arising from surveillance and implications for management.
What factors enable some women to negotiate aspects of their maternity leave? This article theorizes communication-based factors that differentiate leavetakers' experiences, with specific attention given to tactics and negotiation behaviors. The relationship of tactics and behaviors to outcomes from the leavetaker's perspective is also presented.
This paper examines how organizations perceive affordances of social media and how they react to their employees' use of social media through policies, a key means of organizational governance. Existing literature identified 4 affordances - visibility, persistence, editability, and association (between people and between people and information) - as action potentials of social media in organizations. Content analysis of a sample of organizational social media policies reveals that organizations especially reacted to the affordances of visibility and persistence much more than to the affordance of editability. It also discovers a third type of association (between employees and organization). It shows how organizations' reactions to social media evolved from being solely concerned with risk management to also considering its value-generating potential.
Unlike previous research on maternity leave using Department of Labor statistics, survey data, or analyses of single cases or texts, this study explores 15 women's discursive constructions of their workplace experiences while pregnant, on maternity leave, and upon return to paid work. Through a poststructuralist feminist analysis, findings not only show how these women positioned themselves and others vis-à-vis gendered discourses and organizing, but also how this positioning process shaped possibilities for practice in particular ways. The ironies and contradictions exposed by participants' discourse reflect ongoing feminist debates about the productive management of dialectic tensions and suggest directions for change in micropractices and macroprocesses of gendered organizing.
What can we learn about women’s organizational challenges by talking to men about gender roles and work-life? We attend to this question through an interview study with male executives, providing a close interpretive analysis of their talk about employees, wives, children, the division of domestic labor, and work-life policy. The study illustrates how executives’ tacit hesitancy about women’s participation in organizational life is closely connected to preferred gendered relationships in the private sphere. The case reveals a story of meaning in movement—aversive sexism marked by flickers of transformation—demonstrating how talk can both reveal and disrupt enduring gender scripts, and why hearing male voices is integral to addressing women’s work-life dilemmas.
The university has become a site of increased debate over policy and procedures as the experience of sexual harassment reaches all levels of the academic hierarchy. Although this topic has been researched thoroughly, few studies have explored sexual harassment through the voices of men in academe. In this study, sexual harassment is explored from the perspective of two men who are tenured, full professors at a southwestern university. This research employs narrative analysis to locate patterns of discourse that illuminate fractured identities. Through the examination of these fractures, this analysis exposes the ways gender, identity, and sexual harassment are intertwined within academe.
Given that high-intensity telecommuters report feeling socially isolated, this study uses structuration and constructivist theories to examine the role of coworker relationships and informal communication in the context of high-intensity telecommuting. Teleworkers' organizational commitment, job satisfaction, informal communication with peers, and coworker liking were examined. Coworker liking was positively related to teleworkers' informal communication satisfaction with coworkers, and with their organizational commitment and job satisfaction. Complaining talk was negatively related to teleworkers' commitment and satisfaction; informal communication satisfaction was positively related to organizational commitment. Coworker liking moderated the effect of teleworkers' complaining talk on organizational commitment, but not job satisfaction. The buffering effect of coworker relationships is discussed as a resource for organizational members engaged in high-intensity telecommuting.
Although work-family benefits are increasingly important organizational policies, limited research addresses the impact of communication on benefit utilization. However, communication is significant because the perceived appropriateness of work-family benefits emerges through interaction. For example, when coworkers complain about "picking up the slack" for those using family leave, their discourse may impact future decisions of other workers regarding whether they utilize the work-family benefits available to them. We apply Giddens' (1984) Structuration Theory to examine organizational members' discursive responses to conditions (and contradictions) present in utilizing work-family benefits in a governmental organization. We argue the daily discursive practices of individuals can either reinforce or undermine formally stated work-family initiatives, and in turn discuss the implications of this "structuration" of policy.
Women's experiences with sexual harassment were analyzed with three types of variables: occupational and workplace sex ratios, organizational policies and procedures for dealing with sexual harassment problems, and women's cultural status (age and marital status). Regression analyses revealed that extent of contact with men was a key predictor of incidence of harassment, number of different types of harrassment, sexual comments, sexual categorical remarks, and sexual materials. Gender predominance was a significant predictor of physical threats and sexual materials. Informational methods were less successful than proactive methods in reducing incidents of sexual harassment. The analyses support two generalizations. The “contact hypothesis” tested and verified by Gutek and her colleagues provides a substantive understanding of our findings on workplace and occupational numerical predominance. Second, organizations that take a variety of steps to address sexual harassment are more apt to be successful in curtailing the problem than those relying mainly on “get out the word” techniques. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68224/2/10.1177_0891243298012003004.pdf
This chapter examines workplace policies related to virtual work, with a specific focus on telework policies. Such policies are important to successful telework in communicating rules and expectations and providing a basis for negotiation between individual teleworkers and their employers. A content analysis of 35 state government telework policies revealed that such policies are characterized by two major tensions between autonomy and control and between flexibility and rigidity. The first tension relates to issues such as individual versus organizational responsibility for monitoring performance, providing equipment, and ensuring physical and data security, while the second tension relates to the standardization of working hours and eligibility criteria, whether rules are clear or left ambiguous, and the degree of work/family balance. Although explicit contradictions between stated benefits and realities of telework implementation may be problematic, most of the policies used tension productively by providing enough ambiguity to allow for competing individual and organizational interests to co-exist. Practical implications for teleworkers and their managers are suggested.
This study examines electronic surveillance in the workplace, by asking, “Are such practices ethical?” To address this question, classical philosophical and modern psychological approaches to ethics are used. The inquiry begins with the importance of the problem, followed by its evolution and current status. After describing the method of analysis, the article analyzes arguments for and against surveillance. Although there are no easy answers, the “Discussion” section provides a synthesis of the findings and recommendations for best practice. The conclusion summarizes the study, notes its limitations, and offers ideas for future research.
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 for their noncompliance publicly and thus engaged in issue crafting. Specifically, content and statistical analyses revealed that (a) most participants invoked policy justifications to deny requests and (b) differences in hierarchical relationships were not significantly associated with policy justification frequency. These dynamics afford important face-saving functions but hold implications for the moral learning capacity of organizations. The essay concludes with implications for crafting organizational ethics policy.
Telework as a ‘flexible work practice’ is often mythologised as a revolutionary form of work. However, to varying degrees, teleworking opportunities have been undermined by policy instruments predicated on assumed equalities between economic actors. This research suggests that while the request-based policies in the UK are not a guaranteed right, they do provide an important basis for employees to internalise their ‘rights’ and initiate a process for flexible working arrangements. They also imbue a corresponding obligation of firms to consider delivering on those expectations. By contrast Australian privilege-based policy instruments particularly restrict access for those employed in precarious and unskilled areas of the economy. Drawing on international and national telework policy approaches, this paper reflects on tensions between what could be described as ‘rights’ and ‘privilege’ policy approaches to teleworking. It argues that if telework is to become a legitimate employee expectation, policy instruments in Australia must be based firmly on rights, rather than privileges.
Our current national policy regarding sexual harassment, expressed through legal, economic, and popular discourses, exemplifies the Foucauldian paradigm in its attempt to regulate sexuality through seemingly authorless texts. Arguing that regulation through such “discursive technologies”; need not lead to the effects of domination that Foucault recognized, I propose a user‐centered approach to policy drafting that values the knowledge of workers as users and makers of workplace policy.
This research explored how employees perceived and articulated organizational "rules " in describing specific communication problem incidents. The research elicited and analyzed 560 short narratives from MBA students describing an actual on-the-job communication problem caused by another organization member's weak understanding of "how we communicate here." Respondents cited many more unwritten than written sources of guidance, naming 22 different means by which organizations conveyed guidance on "how we communicate here." Categorizing types of communication problems showed that about 20 percent could have been prevented or solved by communication policy guide lines ; other kinds of managerial intervention are recommended for those owing more to bad individual judgment, poor managerial oversight, or dearth or inappropriateness of cues from corporate culture. Organizations with some written policy on communicating may have thought more about "how we com municate here" and how to convey that information to employees. Respondents' cost estimates suggest that communication problems are a drain on profitability and effectiveness. Most organizations should examine how employees learn the communication rules at present and should introduce measures that reduce uncertainty. If employees can make sense of their work environments sooner and more accurately, errors are likely to diminish.
While EEOC guidelines for managing sexual harassment prescribe a strong sexual harassment policy and aggressive remedial action following complaints, a communication approach suggests a need for a more complex understanding of sexual harassment as diffused throughout an organizational culture. The present case study uses a sensemaking approach to explore the response of members of an academic department to an alumnus donor's serial sexual harassment of three of its members. Sensemaking proceeded through three phases: the phase of discovery, the debriefing phase, and the dispersal phase. Insights into the role of humor, white men, shared experiences, and responding to sexual harassment are discussed.
This empirical study of sexual harassment extends the current critical‐interpretive approaches to organizational communication by exploring and examining the role that framing devices play in sequestering stories that might otherwise challenge the dominant interests of organizations. Six framing devices are proposed and reviewed in terms of their relation to hegemony. A quota sample based on figures garnered from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics was selected. Working women were interviewed about their experiences with sexual harassment and their accounts were interpreted according to their reliance on the proposed framing techniques. The findings suggest that the most prominently employed framing devices by the subjugated group are trivialization, denotative hesitancy, and invoking the private domain or private expression. Furthermore, mutual negation, minimalization, self‐defacing, and self‐effacing/erasing emerged as framing techniques. The implication of these findings is that the subjugated group actively participates in the production and reproduction of the dominant organizational ideology.
An analysis of 96 employee requests for accommodation revealed the rules and resources that govern the negotiation of work/life issues in organizations. Using Giddens' structuration theory, the authors identified six rules and three resources commonly employed in seeking assistance in achieving work/life balance and identified ways that these rules and resources reproduce and challenge the system. Implications for managers, employees, and researchers are discussed.
Although human resource (HR) professionals have extensive involvement in workplace bullying situations, research is not reflective of their perspective. The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the use of anti-bullying policy in organizations. Interviews with 36 HR professionals and analysis of 18 organizational policies revealed many HR professionals believed their organizations had policies that addressed bullying, but the policies did not use the term “bullying.” Others did not believe their organizations had policies that could address bullying or did not know if their organization had a policy. What the HR professionals felt the policies communicated and what the policies actually detailed proved to be divergent. Implications of these findings, limitations, and future research are discussed.
Communication, relationships, and practices in virtual work
- J. L. Gibbs
- C. R. Scott
- Y. H. Kim
- S. K. Lee
Social media – a virtual Pandora's Box: Prevalence, possible legal liabilities, and policies
- S. E. Jennings
- J. R. Blount
- M. G. Weatherly
Smart policies for workplace technologies: Email, blogs, cell phones and more
- L. Guerin
Should I do as you say or do as you do? Mixed messages about work and family
- Kirby E. L.
Meeting the challenges of human resource management: A communication perspective
- C. Medved