Abstract
As of writing this commentary, we have spent a little over 9 months into our co-editorship of the International Journal of Business Communication (IJBC), and this issue comes out one year into our tenure. During this time, we have been working with some of the best people in the field of business communication (writers, reviewers, associate editors, and publishers) in planning how to improve an already high-quality journal. With this first issue of the New Year, we want to talk about some milestones the journal has recently achieved and share a vision with you.
Simply put, we want IJBC to transform how people view business communication. We seek to have everyone understand business communication’s vital role in modern organizations. More important, we commit to amplify the already positive and vibrant energy that this journal’s stakeholders express toward exploring business communication. Business communication—in all types of organizations—provides the nervous system of an organization and its external links. Let us move it to the center stage.
One important step in achieving this goal is to grow IJBC’s visibility (among scholars and the wider public), making IJBC the outlet everyone thinks of first when they want to publish an organizational communication piece or find breakthrough business communication knowledge. The journal, thanks to the efforts of the ABC Board, managing editor Jim Dubinsky, previous editor Robyn Walker, Sage, and all its contributors, has already reached a visibility benchmark. This past summer, the journal became listed in the Social Science Citation Index, arguably the most prestigious journal listing in the world. This honor comes from demonstrating a sustained level of high-quality, highly cited research. In line with this achievement, we hope to increase the already high level of submissions to the journal, and to encourage our writers to take risks with their work. The anticipated fruits of these challenges are novel and meaningful discoveries that move the field beyond just looking for knowledge gaps to forging new insights into how communication works in and between organizations and people.
Such innovation brings us to our second aspiration for IJBC—transformative visions. We will devote a later editorial commentary to this aspiration, but here is an overview that aligns with how the authors contribute in extraordinary ways to this current issue. Researchers present a transformative vision with their scholarship by offering the reader a new lens on reality—changing how we view the world. To do so, the researcher must first lay out a current world view (organizational communication phenomenon and demonstrate how that view falls short. Then the researcher must give a clearer picture of what has been overlooked along with its relevance, and sustain this view with argument and evidence. We see the authors in this issue creating just such new visions.
Discovering new worldviews requires a lot of work, but one approach is to combine complementary methods to examine existing phenomena. Adame and Bisel’s (2019) article follows this path. In “Can Perceptions of an Individual’s Organizational Citizenship Be Influenced via Strategic Impression Management Messaging,” the authors apply a two-stage process to uncover unexpected ways in which people use impression management at work. They first used interviews to develop study parameters and then investigated further through survey methods in the second part of their study. From this analysis, they found the implicit rules of organizational citizenship behavior attributions and subsequently examined the ramifications of these rules through statistical means. If the authors had relied on either interview or survey methods alone, we doubt they would have come to such distinct and insightful conclusions.
Next, MacDonald, Kelly, and Christen (2019) address relationship mechanisms (mediators) to enrich our understanding about how leadership communication operates. Often research fixates on the existence of a relationship (does one construct cause changes in another construct) while ignoring how these changes occur. In “A Path Model of Workplace Solidarity, Satisfaction, Burnout, and Motivation,” these authors explore how solidarity flows through job satisfaction to influence motivation and burnout. Looking at causal mechanisms helps us grasp the how of organizational communication while identifying paths for its enhancement. Beyond their conceptual contributions, the authors also made methodological strides by correcting their data for measurement reliability—a task that clarifies study analysis, yet one that scholars rarely perform.
Braun, Bark, Kirchner, Stegmann, and van Dick’s (2019) “Emails From the Boss—Curse or Blessing” shows us how to harness existing theory—media richness (Armengol, Fernandez, Simo, & Sallan, 2017; Daft & Lengel, 1986)—in order to explore an increasingly ubiquitous workplace communication situation. This article underscores the need to continually test established theories as organizational reality changes. Theories serve as powerful frameworks for perspective taking and inform us in advancing research. However, in the social sciences, we must also balance these guideposts in dynamic contexts. With significant changes in circumstances, our challenge is to reevaluate the pertinence of existing theories and to refine or even replace those that are no longer relevant.
Jonathan Clifton’s (2019) “Investigating the Dark Side of Stories of Good Leadership” adopts a compelling case study to present a new lens on a common phenomenon. This article investigates how management gurus employ communication methods to craft and manipulate perceptions—often for nefarious purposes. Clifton enlightens us on how persuasive communication tactics—through seductive narratives and tantalizing stories—suppress our critical thinking to the story teller’s advantage. The article also looks at what we mean by leadership and warns us against being deceived by our tendency to look at people with an idealistic perspective.
This article also provides an excellent example of qualitative research as a study on a sample of one (Cassell & Symon, 2004). While debate will always exist about what is or is not qualitative research, we advance the idea that a qualitative study can examine a single event (whether a person, activity, group, or movement) in great depth and bring to light discoveries that a quantitative analysis would miss. As such, a qualitative study’s value comes from how much it changes our worldview or brings us new ideas. Quantitative studies rely on being generalizable—how well the findings in a given study apply to other situations; qualitative studies rely on making us think differently about an interesting phenomenon.
We can also transform vision by looking at well-established relationships in unconventional situations. Hartge, Callahan, and King (2019) take this route in their article “Leaders’ Behaviors During Radical Change Processes.” Considerable research (by its nature) looks at how phenomena operate in stable settings. However, such behaviors and processes may significantly deviate during extraordinary times, and such contexts often constitute the new norm for business communication.
Congruently, Kopaneva’s (2019) “Left in the Dust” takes a refreshing approach to the communicative role of vision/mission statements. Kopaneva incorporated the intended purpose of these declarations at face value—to create a shared understanding of how an organization should operate. She looked at how communication of a vision/mission helps workers construct their reality and, in turn, how their perceptions shape the vision/mission’s implementation. She arrived at this understanding by adopting a new perspective—instead of the traditional management oriented focus, she assumed a worker oriented focus. Her initiative spotlights how discoveries arise from shifting our perspectives. Of course, this skill implies that we first overcome attributional barriers through vigilance toward subjective biases and entrenched paradigms. Mental agility remains one of the most critical tools in a scholar’s toolbox.
In conclusion, we recognize the challenges and diligence required to craft a transformative vision, and we commend the authors in this issue for serving as role models. To extend such progress, we collaborate with our associate editors to nurture developmental reviews for manuscripts submitted to IJBC. We are inspired by the successful implementation of developmental reviews at the Academy of Management Review (Ragins, 2014, 2017). With a developmental review, we (and our associate editors in partnership with reviewers) try to identify what makes a manuscript unique—how it advances and changes our view of business communication. Then, together we coach authors to instill and frame this added value in their manuscripts for IJBC readers. Developmental reviews move critiquing for problems in a manuscript to refining scholarship to be the best it can be. Our goal is to give every manuscript that comes across the IJBC desk (whether it is published, sent back for revision, or rejected) meaningful feedback on how it can be stronger and more influential. Regardless of the final editorial decision, this aspiration will enrich the field of business communication.
We feel excited about working with the IJBC community over the next few years and seeing the journal continue to build and push the boundaries of business communication research. We invite you to take this journey with us.