International Journal of Business Communication

Disruptive environmental trends are forcing organizations to be more innovative in their approaches to organizational strategy generation. Rather than using a traditional top-down approach, some organizations are turning to open strategizing, which involves a large number of stakeholders who communicate in transparent, virtual environments. This study used a case analysis to explore one organization’s use of crowdsourcing technology in a move from a traditional to an open strategizing approach. Drawing on technology affordance and communicative-as-constitutive perspectives, we identified individual and collective crowdsourcing technology affordances for strategizing. Subsequently, we explored how the technology affordances influenced organizational strategizing. Results showed that crowdsourced strategy was constituted as multivoice, divergent, egalitarian, and inclusive.

Employees increasingly interact through social networking platforms in the workplace. A distinguishing feature of these platforms is their ability to build a sense of community (SOC)—the feelings of membership, influence, integration, and fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection. Yet much remains to be understood as to the way these platforms contribute to building a SOC at workplaces. This study examines whether organizational members exhibit community-like behaviors and processes in intranet communication. The study also tests a theoretical model in which members’ perceptions of the group’s norms affect the antecedents of SOC. The results of a survey of 112 employees revealed that both exchanging and observing support increased feelings of SOC. Furthermore, the perception of group norms mediated the relationship between observing and exchanging support and SOC. This study contributes to the field of business communication by applying a theory-based framework to intranets and empirically testing the role of group norms in shaping online communication behaviors at workplaces.

This study explored how coworkers use internal social media (ISM) to contribute to the construction of organizational identity. The study analyzed 3 months of interactions among coworkers at a large Danish bank on ISM. In addition, 17 coworkers were interviewed to provide additional understanding about the online interactions. The study found that these coworkers constructed organizational identity when they challenge, negotiate, and discuss organizational issues on ISM. They use phrases from vision and mission statements to support their arguments and to push the understanding of organizational identity so that it is in line with their perceptions of what the bank really is or should be. Some of these discussions on ISM develop into organizational stories, which are shared and discussed in informal, in-person conversations among coworkers. The stories become narratives, which contribute to the organizational identity, help coworkers make sense of the organization, and help them identify with the organization.

Team communication platforms (TCPs), including the Slack software service, are an emergent class of social collaboration technology that combine features of multiple enterprise social media including social networking platforms and instant messaging. The media capabilities of these platforms, including integrations for diverse information and communication technologies, enable affordances for both highly adaptable and centralized team communication practices. In order to understand emergent practices in TCPs, this study offers a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the reflective practice of early adopter organizations and individuals based on a sample of self-published blog posts. Results indicate that TCPs enable affordances for communication visibility that support situated knowledge sharing and collaborative workflows. TCPs also enable affordances for multicommunication and attention allocation including flexible scaling of media modality and synchronicity. This latter affordance is conceptualized as polysynchronicity, a term that describes the dynamic synchronicity characteristic of communication practices in TCPs.