International Journal of Business Communication

This content analysis investigates bank presidents’ letters in the aftermath of the financial market crisis (2007/2008). We posit that managers use accounts as a rhetorical device in order to influence responsibility judgments of stakeholders. Therefore, we draw on attribution theory, self-presentational theories and research on account giving to develop our hypotheses. From our model of responsibility judgment, we infer how banks will react to their financial performance after the financial market crisis (2007/2008). We test this with a sample built from 91 U.S. and European banks, which were all severely hit by this crisis. Our results indicate that bank managers use accounts as linguistic devices to influence the responsibility judgments of stakeholders: Refusals and to relativize are used to influence their situational perception, concessions and excuses target on locus and controllability perceptions, and initiatives and outlooks affect stability perceptions.

Some people see multinational collaboration as a problem, while others see it as an opportunity. Intercultural teamwork involves a dynamic push-pull tension between diversity and unity which places its study solidly within a dialectic perspective. In-depth interviews were conducted with 27 individuals who held management or supervisory positions, worked on multinational teams, and spent time working abroad. Their companies represent a broad range of industries and collectively these individuals worked on teams in several dozen countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, North and South America, as well as Australia and New Zealand. The results revealed a variety of cultural paradoxes and dialectics, complexities, and differences which affect many aspects of collaborative work. The importance of cultural identity and relationship recur throughout participant narratives. Dialectics include self-other validation, autonomy-connection, national-organizational culture, work-life, ambiguity-certainty, efficiency-redundancy, and direct-indirect communication styles. Intersections among dialectics are also identified.

This study explored relationships between organizational assimilation, organizational reputation, and organizational dissent. Survey data collection using standard instruments was conducted with a sample of employees drawn from three countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia). Analysis revealed that the expression of dissent to management and to coworkers was significantly and positively correlated with both organizational assimilation and organizational reputation. In particular, findings suggest that employees who reported being more socialized within their respective organizations also expressed more dissent to managers and to coworkers. Similarly, employees who reported perceiving their organizations as more ethical and reputable were more likely to express dissent to managers and coworkers. Additional analyses indicated that the relationships identified between variables were immune to the effects of organizational tenure and national culture. In particular, the results show that organizational assimilation is a key determinant of organizational dissent and that organizational reputation is a key reason that employees express it.

Motivating language (ML) is a leader oral-communication strategy which has been significantly linked to such positive employee outcomes as higher job performance, increased job satisfaction, lower intention to turnover, and decreased absenteeism. However, most ML research has not targeted an organizational system at multiple levels. In brief, we have not looked at how this beneficial form of communication is actually implemented throughout an organization, including at the CEO level. In response to this gap, our main goals were to identify robust hypotheses on ML diffusion for future empirical testing, better understand the emergent processes of ML adoption within an organization, and advance development of related theory. These goals were achieved through an agent-based simulation model, drawn from management, communication, and social network scholarship. More specifically, overview, design concepts, and details protocol and NetLogo software were applied to simulate ML diffusion among all leader levels within an organization. This model also captured the influences of predicted moderators, and results were then interpreted to create testable hypotheses. Findings suggest that top-leader oral language use and organizational culture have the most profound impact on ML diffusion, followed by rewards, with partial weak support for the effects of training, turnover, and time. Recommendations were also made for future research on this topic, especially for empirical tests.

This article explores the role of email in the ambiguous circumstances of an established international partnership that is developing into competition. Using the naturally occurring interaction of a longitudinal ethnographic study, we study the ensuing task and relationship conflicts through the communication medium. Results show that the conflict is facilitated by email, not as an unfortunate side-effect but as a strategic choice of distance, partly for passive protection but also for active control of the interaction. We use the results to chart the multiple situated identities of the communicators that are made salient in their virtual interaction. The double aspect of social and organizational contexts is shown to have an effect on different issues, such as organizational authority at the home organization, the buyer-supplier relationship, nonnative language use, and norms of communication style in the interaction.

This study aims to grow our current understanding of situational crisis communication theory by expanding on the conceptualization of causal responsibility as the primary mechanism contributing to the cognitive formulation of blame by stakeholder groups. By doing so, this research sought to assess the differential impact of common media frames of crisis events in order to inform organizational crisis communication efforts. A total of 186 students participated in an experimental study from a Midwest university. A series of multivariate analyses of variances were computed to assess the hypotheses advanced in the study. Results indicated that crisis frames can negatively affect organizational reputations. Episodic frames were found to amplify the reputational threat levels in both the victim and accidental clusters. Findings also indicated that when stakeholders perceive the source of the media report as being highly credible, more negative perceptions toward the organizations involved in the crisis were generated. The results help inform the corporate communication response process designed to address the “image” of a crisis as an attribute of consideration, in relation to the framing of the crisis event. Limitations and future directions are offered.

Leadership styles that promote upward and downward communication have been shown to foster a plethora of positive outcomes within the workplace, group collaborations, and team contexts. Similarly, supervisor-subordinate solidarity communication has been related to desirable workplace outcomes. The purpose of this study was to investigate leadership styles as related to solidarity communication. The authoritarian leadership style was associated with the lowest solidarity and consistently yielded the least job satisfaction and highest burnout in subordinates. Furthermore, subordinates with authoritarian leaders did not fit the supervisor-subordinate solidarity model. A more nuanced explanation of leadership communication as related to solidarity is discussed.