Management Communication Quarterly

The contemporary media environment transforms the organization-volunteer relationship by attenuating the formation of organizational belonging, often thought to be the result of direct interactions and face-to-face meetings. We examine and compare factors that influence offline and online volunteering. We investigate the ties for communicating about volunteering that bind individuals to nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and the ways that multiple levels of identification influence volunteer commitment to these NPOs. Using structural equation modeling, the results from an online survey of 816 volunteers suggest that online volunteers, unlike offline volunteers, are not motivated to volunteer more by exclusive relationships with organizational members or their volunteer identity. Their volunteering is related to their communication ties with both members and nonmembers and their identification with both the organization and the social issue. We discuss implications regarding how the changed dynamics in online volunteering complicates the traditional organization-volunteer relationship.

This article explores how contradictory sources of authority manifest the organizational presence of a crisis pregnancy center (CPC) in the southeastern region of the United States. As a type of shadowed organization, a CPC’s organizational presence is produced in a tensional space between dialectics of revelation and concealment. With an interest toward understanding these dynamics, we conduct a ventriloquial analysis of CPC’s pamphlets and website to examine how sources of authority produce the CPC as a distinct organization. Through this analysis, we develop the idea of authorial incongruity—the co-presence of multiple and heterogeneous sources of authority—to demonstrate how organizational presence emerges as a byproduct of tensional relations between authorities, which serve as resources for organizations seeking to present themselves as consistently “who they have always been.” The implications of these findings suggest distinct challenges and opportunities for building strategic relations between (shadowed) organizations and various incongruent stakeholder groups.

Urban scholars suggest that communication can be key to equity advocacy and organizing for social justice in cities, but a gap exists in studies grounded in communication theory. This article theorizes everyday urban equity advocacy through communication infrastructure theory (CIT), an ecological framework grounded in the notion that communities are discursively constructed. Sourced from 34 semi-structured interviews in Chicago, this article examines how organizers from social change-focused organizations activate community storytelling network actors (residents, community organizations, and local media) to advocate for equity. I find that organizers activate this network to cultivate consciousness, build capacity, and amplify equity work for marginalized communities. The study is important in demonstrating how advocating for equity is best when it is an intentional process that activates multi-stakeholder engagement in urban neighborhoods year-round.

Guided by the job demand-control-support model of workplace strain, this study tested a theoretical model of academic work environments to explain workplace bullying in academia. College professors (N = 503) completed a questionnaire about working in academia and experiencing bullying at work. Results of a conditional process analysis revealed that psychological job demands affected workplace bullying incidents directly, and indirectly through increased occupational stress; however, the mediated effect depended on how supportive the supervisor was and how much control professors had over their job duties (moderated moderated mediation). In departments where supervisors provided low to average social support to faculty, the indirect effect on bullying was weakened when professors had more decision authority over how they completed their job demands (moderated mediation). However, in departments where supervisors were highly supportive, there was no indirect effect of demands on workplace bullying through stress, despite how much or little decision authority professors had in doing their jobs (no moderated mediation). These findings speak to the importance of appointing a chairperson who will encourage professors’ autonomy in completing their work, and, more crucially, provide social support to discourage faculty bullying in response to job stressors.

More than 5.89 million people have died from COVID-19. Due to COVID-19, there is a need for organizations to reconsider their structures and systems in response to increased remote working and decreased face-to-face (FTF) interactions. This study analyzes organizational relationships, specifically the supervisor-subordinate relationship. This study examines the link between supervisor-subordinate immediacy and organizational identification in mediated communication. Participants from three nations (n = 1776) were explored to test the assumption that supervisor-subordinate immediacy explains organizational identification. The United States, Australia, and England were chosen as focal nations due to the differing government responses to the COVID-19 outbreak. Results revealed supervisors’ perceived computer-mediated immediate behaviors and subordinates’ perceived immediacy with their supervisors were positive predictors of organizational identity. U.S. supervisors were perceived to use higher levels of computer-mediated immediacy behaviors and have more perceived immediacy than Australian and English supervisors. Australian supervisors had higher levels of perceived immediacy than English supervisors.

The potentially destructive effects of informal communication in the form of negative workplace gossip have recently attracted scholars’ interest. Beyond the perspectives of prior studies (e.g., the conservation of resources (COR) and self-consistency theories), we offer a new account based on social identity theory and propose that negative workplace gossip is related to target employees’ decreased organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) by undermining their identification with the organization. We also theorize that collectivism influences the extent to which employees identify with the organization when being targeted by negative gossip. By collecting three-wave supervisor–subordinate dyadic data from China, we demonstrated that organizational identification mediates the negative relationship between negative workplace gossip and OCB when the effects of other mediators studied by previous perspectives (i.e., organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) and emotional exhaustion) were controlled. In addition, we found that collectivism moderates the indirect effect of negative workplace gossip on OCB through organizational identification.

Organizations without healthy dissent stagnate from myopic thinking. Previous research has examined how employees might dissent to supervisors or coworkers, but little research has focused on how dissent might be expressed to multiple audiences simultaneously. Dissent conversations might happen only once or might be repeated over time, but the ways in which dissent processes unfold over time has also been neglected in past research. The present study examined biweekly meetings in the fundraising department of a nonprofit organization for 2 years to explore organizational dissent across time and to reveal possible nuances in the ways in which dissenters express disagreement. Results revealed several dissent topics repeated during the data collection period with mixed results—some of these topics were resolved whereas others were not. Two dissent conversations emerged as particularly meaningful events in the history of the department. At the same time, these data illustrated dissent expressed to multiple audiences (a single dissenter simultaneously talking to a supervisor and multiple coworkers) and dissent expressed by multiple dissenters. These forms of collective dissent extend previous models of organizational dissent that typically conceptualize a conversation between a single dissenter and a single dissent audience.