International Journal of Business Communication

Analysis of photographs in the annual reports of 25 airline firms over a six-year period disclosed inconographic portrayal of women in subservient, less-serious roles than men. As an annual report represents the personality and philosophy of the firm, latent messages of sex-role stereotyping should be avoided. Implications of sex-role depictions in business media are discussed and suggestions for further research are offered.

Research on organizational communication has concentrated on the vertical and horizontal dimensions. Studies that deal with diagonal interaction are few and almost no theory explains the need for such interactions. This study shows that, for high per forming groups, diagonal interactions may be necessary when environmental tur bulence makes work-related problems difficult to solve and the organizational climate is supportive of innovation.

This study explored the factor structure underlying communication behaviors in employment interviews, and the effects of interviewer gender and age. Results revealed six dimensions of influential communication factors in employment interviews: resourcefulness, written credentials, support for arguments, social attributes, comport ment, and style. An applicant's support for arguments and social attributes appeared to be more important to younger recruiters than to older recruiters, but neither gender nor gender by age interaction significantly affected factor importance.

An experimental design was used to study supervisory-subordinate group decision making of eight groups under three conditions: supervisor physically present; super visor present via audio teleconferencing; supervisor present via audio /graphics telecon ferencing. Two group decisions were made under each condition. Decision quality, communication style and participant satisfaction were measured for each condition. In addition, qualitative assessments were conducted at the end of the study. No statistic ally significant differences were found on any of the dependent variables. The qualita tive analysis also indicated no differences among the treatments. The implication of this study is that supervisory /subordination group communication via telecommunica tions rather than physical presence affects neither subordinate group decision making nor interaction.