Birte Asmuß

Performance Appraisal Interviews: Preference Organization in Assessment Sequences

Performance appraisal interviews play a crucial role in internal communication. Most of the research on performance appraisal interviews has focused on strategic aims and interview design, but less attention has been given to the way in which performance appraisal interviews actually take place. In this study, the focus will, therefore, be to investigate how one of the crucial and most delicate activities in performance appraisal interviews, namely, giving critical feedback, is conducted. The way critical feedback is given is predominantly through negative assessments. The results indicate that there is an orientation to critical feedback as a socially problematic action despite the institutional character of the talk. Moreover, it can be seen that the more the supervisor shows an orientation to negative assessments as being socially problematic, the more difficult it becomes for the employee to deal with negative assessments. The study ends by outlining various implications for the workplace.

Negotiation of entitlement in proposal sequences

Meetings are complex institutional events at which participants recurrently negotiate institutional roles, which are oriented to, renegotiated, and sometimes challenged. With a view to gaining further understanding of the ongoing negotiation of roles at meetings, this article examines one specific recurring feature of meetings: the act of proposing future action. Based on microanalysis of video recordings of two-party strategy meetings, the study shows that participants orient to at least two aspects when making proposals: 1) the acceptance or rejection of the proposal; and 2) questions of entitlement: who is entitled to launch a proposal, and who is entitled to accept or reject it? The study argues that there is a close interrelation between questions of entitlement, aligning and affiliating moves, and the negotiation of institutional roles. The multimodal analysis also reveals the use of various embodied practices by participants for the local negotiation of entitlement and institutional roles.

The Role of Recontextualization in the Multivocal, Ambiguous Process of Strategizing

This paper shows how ambiguity arises across multiple strategizing activities through the presence of multiple strategic actors within and across different strategizing phases. During the authoring phase, the intentionality of the different management actor voices becomes detached from the meaning expressed in the strategy text, resulting in a decontextualized, monovocal strategy paper. In the translation phase, the study shows how the text still possesses an inherent multivocality making it impossible to talk about strategy text as an atemporal, neutral object. In the phase of interpreting the strategy, three main rhetorical positions are identified among the employees:acceptance, ambiguity and rejection, representing the multivocal interpretations of the employees interviewed. The study contributes to the ongoing discussion about the challenges and potentials of the multivocal, multicontextual nature of strategizing in organizations.

A practice perspective on strategic communication: The discursive legitimization of managerial decisions

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to link the authentic, communicative activities, e.g. organization-wide meetings at the micro-level, to the institutionalized practices at the macro-level within an organization, e.g. change management decisions and communication strategy (Steyn, 2003). Thus, the concern is with the relationship between institutionalized strategic management and the real-life strategic communication processes, thus advancing the understanding of the role of texts and discourses in the actual practice of strategic communication in an organizational context of strategic change processes. Design/methodology/approach – The data are based on a large corpus of video-taped management meetings and organization-wide meetings in a large Danish public, knowledge-based organization. The method applied for studying the management discourse is a conversation-analytical approach (Sacks et al., 1974; Sidnell, 2010). This method has been chosen as it enables the authors to focus on micro-aspects of o...

Management conversations in Danish companies

Purpose – Good stakeholder relations are crucial for the corporate image and reputation of modern organisations. One important management tool for use in successfully establishing good stakeholder relations involves management conversations. Until now these conversations have not been investigated extensively either in general or specifically within the field of corporate communication. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this developing field of research by presenting the results of a study of management conversations.Design/methodology/approach – The paper investigates the ways in which various management conversations are used strategically in companies to benefit relations with stakeholders and the image or reputation of the company concerned. The conversations studied are recruitment conversations, job appraisal interviews, round‐table sickness leave conversations and dismissal conversations.Findings – The paper shows that the companies involved are aware that such conversations should be u...

The emergence of symmetries and asymmetries in performance appraisal interviews: An interactional perspective:

Performance appraisal interviews (PAI) are in a Scandinavian context supposed to be dialogues between equal partners. This implies a focus on the superior and subordinate as conducting a conversation more than an interview, and a focus on development instead of performance. The article seeks to investigate how these ideals are lived up to in the practice of conducting a PAI. On the basis of a corpus of 30 hours of videotaped PAIs and applying a conversation analytical approach, the study shows that interactional symmetries and asymmetries can arise as a consequence of interactional practices that are dynamically negotiated between and agreed upon by the co-participants on a turn-by-turn basis. These symmetries and asymmetries emerge due to the participants’ orientations to institutional and social norms that can intertwine and overlap, thus impeding, postponing or supporting the ideals of PAIs as being dialogues between equal partners.

Mediated business: living the organizational surroundings – introduction

ABSTRACT This special section builds upon Deirdre Boden’s work on the constitutive nature of talk for organizations and the Culture & Organization 2004 special issue that developed her concern. Specifically, we aim to further engage with how business is managed, formed and locally accomplished by means of the organizational surroundings that the participants make themselves part of and the multimodal resources that they have at their disposal, in other words: how people live the organizational surroundings. Our hope is to shed light on future directions in the multimodal analysis of workplace interaction and studies of organization in general, and encourage a further interconnection among scholars from various disciplines.