Donald Dean Morley

Adhering to Organizational Culture What Does It Mean? Why Does It Matter?

As a result of pervasive interest in communication and culture, increasing efforts are being focused on understanding communication/culture relationships and relating them to important organizational processes and outcomes. In an effort to contribute to our understanding, the present study was designed to determine whether thematic rules can be identified as direct reflections of culture and to relate thematic organizational rules to employee values, perceptions of actual and desired message sending and receiving activities, and organizational outcomes, such as perceptions of organizational success and satisfaction with organizational relationships and rewards. The results indicated that rule-value discrepancies, message sending differences, message receiving uncertainty, work satisfaction, and estimations of organizational quality and survival are interrelated and supportive of previously postulated theoretical relationships among values, culture, behaviors, and outcomes.

The role of importance, novelty, and plausibility in producing belief change

This study investigated the role of importance, novelty, and plausibility of message information in producing belief change. Participants in the study were 224 university students who read messages...

Organizational Communication and Culture: A Study of 10 Italian High- Technology Companies

An important contribution of this research is the testing in international envi ronments of communication and culture models previously developed within U.S.A. high-technology organizations. Specifically, this research demonstrates that relationships among organizational culture themes, employee values, organizational communication activities, and perceptions of a variety of organi zational outcomes are similar but not identical for U.S.A. and European high- technology organizations. Secondly, the research extends previous work by identifying cultural dimensions that are related to a variety of communication processes.

Subjective Message Constructs: A Theory of Persuasion.

Subjective message construct theory maintains that the underlying constructs, or cognitive tests, that receivers apply to persuasive messages require that message information be perceived as important, novel, and plausible for belief change to occur. In three different studies a total of six complete replications of the theory were performed. For each replication respondents indicated their subjective beliefs in the probability of the claim, datum, claim given the datum, and claim if not the datum. These subjective probabilities were subsequently placed in a mathematical formulation that represented a multiplicative combination of importance, novelty, and plausibility. The results from six replications indicated that between 25 and 50% percent of the variance in belief change can be explained by subjective message construct theory. Additionally, the results from validity checks indicated that subjective probabilities can be used to construct valid operational measures of importance and novelty.

Conflict Avoiders and Compromisers: Toward an Understanding of their Organizational Communication Style

This study examines the organizational communication style of individuals with different conflict-style preferences and the relation-ship of conflict-style preferences to organizational position, employment expectations, and communication satisfaction. The results indicated that individuals with preferences for conflict avoidance and compromising exhibited identifiable organizational communi-cation styles. Furthermore, managers were more likely to use a competitive conflict style than nonmanagers, while those who expected to stay in their present position were more likely to use a compromising style.

Attitudes and parental factors as intervening variables in the television violence‐aggression relation

This study examines the relationship of cognitive and parental factors affecting adolescents viewing of television violence. Participants in the study were 422 adolescents and 298 of their parents who were surveyed for their viewing behaviors, perceptions of violent portrayals, and aggressive behavioral tendencies. Regression analysis indicated that attitude was the strongest predictor of aggression. The more adolescents reported liking television violence, the more aggressive were their intentions. Results suggested that while exposure to violence and parental factors both play a part in mediating subsequent aggression, viewing violence is less important than liking violence.

Assessing the reliability of student evaluations of teaching: choosing the right coefficient

Many of the studies used to support the claim that student evaluations of teaching are reliable measures of teaching effectiveness have frequently calculated inappropriate reliability coefficients. This paper points to three coefficients that would be appropriate depending on if student evaluations were used for formative or summative purposes. Results from the present study indicated that students had very low absolute inter-rater reliability, but somewhat higher consistency inter-rater reliability.

SPSS macros for assessing the reliability and agreement of student evaluations of teaching

This article reports and demonstrates two SPSS macros for calculating Krippendorff’s alpha and intraclass reliability coefficients in repetitive situations where numerous coefficients are needed. Specifically, the reported SPSS macros were used to evaluate the interrater agreement and reliability of student evaluations of teaching in thousands of university course sections. The reported demonstration used 1086 course sections and found that students were frequently unable to attain acceptable levels of interrater reliability and agreement in their evaluations of faculty. Although the macros are not contained in the manuscript, a website is referenced where they can be downloaded free of charge.