International Journal of Business Communication

Kitty Locker made an enormous contribution to the discipline of business communication through her textbooks, articles, papers, and vivid personal presence. This article reviews five primary focuses of her contributions: rethinking the formula for negative messages, connecting pedagogical scholarship to research, fostering the disciplinary research community, presenting historical research, and mentoring the people in business communication.

The use of conversation analysis (CA) as an applied research methodology that can be of interest to business communication is sometimes overlooked. Taking the case of leadership as an example, this article demonstrates how CA can provide a fine-grained analysis of talk-in-interaction during a business meeting, which reveals an emic perspective on “what is going on.” By linking such an analysis to wider social theorizing, notably a social constructivist approach to leadership and the construction of reality, CA is able to make explicit the normally “seen but unnoticed” machinery of talk with which leadership is enacted. Moreover, the results of such an analysis can give researchers a clearer insight into the phenomenon and help practitioners improve leadership and communication skills.

This research provides strong support for the existence of dominant media norms within organizations and describes their influence on employees’ (a) perceptions of organizational norms, (b) reported media use, and (c) performance evaluations. Survey results demonstrate the presence of strong organizational norms for instant messaging (IM) and e-mail use within a large, high-tech organization. These norms, as well as supervisory behavior, may influence employees’ use of IM and e-mail and even more so when employees have strong polychronic orientations. In addition, employees who reportedly followed organizational norms by using IM and e-mail were awarded higher performance ratings by their supervisors, with 30% of the variance explained. The authors support the survey findings with in-depth interviews with participants exploring media use.