Joe R. Downing

Teaching students in the basic course how to use presentation software

Seventy‐six students from a mid‐sized southeastern university in four basic communication courses were broken into two treatment groups‐two classes received hands‐on training in PowerPoint, while the other two classes were handed a brief Users Guide to PowerPoint that was created by the authors. Students in the Users Guide group were told to learn PowerPoint on their own, while the hands‐on, computer‐trained group received forty‐five minutes of training during classtime. Results from this study indicate that training‐regardless if it takes the form of hands‐on training delivered in a computer classroom or if a Users Guide to PowerPoint is distributed to the students‐makes a difference in students’ overall confidence level using both computers and PowerPoint. However, hands‐on computer training was not significantly more effective in raising students’ confidence level (using either computers or PowerPoint) than simply giving the students the Users Guide and having the student learn the software package on their own. Implications of this finding for Basic Course Directors is offered, along with possible avenues for future research.

“It’s Easier to Ask Someone I Know” Call Center Technicians’ Adoption of Knowledge Management Tools

This article traces the early implementation phase of a set of knowledge management tools in four customer call support centers within a multinational corporation. Through a case study analysis, this article addresses two fundamental issues. First, the article investigates how the organization keeps a new type of knowledge worker—the relatively unskilled, low-paid customer call support technicians who staff the phones at centers around the United States—current with the latest information on those products they support. Second, data from the case study suggest specific innovation factors that discourage technicians from adopting the knowledge tools.

How Individuals Process NWS Weather Warning Messages on Their Cell Phones

AbstractU.S. government officials are focusing their attention on how to deliver timely and effective warning information to the public, especially given the devastating weather-related events that have occurred in recent years. With the increase of cell phones (and in particular, web-capable smartphones), weather warnings sent through various cellular technologies represent one way for officials to quickly notify an increasingly mobile public. Cellular technology innovations also make it possible for officials to broadcast information-rich media like graphics to cell phones. Whether warning messages must include such “rich” media to be effective remains an open question. The current study investigates the effectiveness of National Weather Service (NWS) warning messages sent either in plain text or in text that includes a radar image of the storm. The research protocol was modeled after the interactive National Weather Service (iNWS) messaging service currently available to NWS core partners. In the study...

No Greater Sacrifice: American Airlines Employee Crisis Response to the September 11 Attack

This case study reports the identification strategies and related tactics that American Airlines CEO Don Carty and his team of professional communicators used in their employee crisis response to the September 11 attack. Data analyzed in the study include 78 internal documents; 10 articles from the airlines corporate newspaper; and interviews with Timothy Doke, then American Airlines Vice President of Corporate Communications, and Andrea Rader, a senior member of Dokes team. The results of this study provide guidance to corporate communicators tasked with rebuilding employee morale after a malevolent-type crisis.

Using Electronic Surveys in Organizational/Employee Communication Research: A Study at GE's Global Research Center

This study explores methodological issues that communication scholars and practitioners face when administering electronic surveys within for-profit organizations. In 2000, the researchers conducted a series of three cross-sectional studies within General Electrics (GE) Global Research Center. The Center is located in Niskayuna, NY. An equivalent version of a communication survey was administered electronically to a random stratified sample of GE employees three times that year. Each employee sample was subject to a different survey intervention: no intervention, follow-up reminder email only, and leader pre-announcement email plus a follow-up reminder. The researchers also recorded how long it took respondents to return their surveys. The highest response rate (41%) occurred in the third intervention. Across the three administrations, 465 GE employees completed the surveys; 98% of respondents returned their surveys electronically rather than printing out their responses and sending them to the researcher by postal mail. The article concludes with implications and suggestions for those who administer electronic surveys within organizations.

Speaking Ebonics in a Professional Context: The Role of Ethos/Source Credibility and Perceived Sociability of the Speaker

Within a theoretical context of speech accommodation theory, this study follows Lambert et al.‘s (1960) “matched-guise” technique. Seventy-two African-American students at a mid-south university listened to and evaluated a tape-recorded excerpt of a speech given by Jesse Jackson at the 1996 Democratic National Convention. The first version of the speech was translated into Ebonics. After students listened to the first four-minute speech in Ebonics, students then proceeded to answer a questionnaire concerning the ethos/source credibility and perceived sociability of the speaker. Next, students listened to the same audiotaped speech (given by the same speaker), except the text of the speech was translated (and subsequently delivered) in Standard English. The students then rated this second speaker on those same ethos/source credibility and sociability scales. The speaker who used Standard English was viewed as more credible (i.e., more competent and having a strong character) and sociable than the Ebonics speaker. Both of these scores were significant at the p .05 level. Future research replicating these results is urged across other African-American samples.

Assessing Risk Following a Wireless Emergency Alert: Are 90 Characters Enough?

Abstract In a relatively new initiative, homeland security and other emergency management officials use wireless cell technology to communicate Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) messages to an increasingly mobile public. Severe weather warnings represent one type of WEA message that the public can receive on their cell phone. So far, officials have limited WEA messages to 90 characters of text and therefore have excluded information-rich weather graphics like warning polygons and radar images. The question remains if this lean messaging strategy effectively communicates the risk and severity of the storm. In the current study, the researchers created prototype WEA tornado warning messages equivalent to both popular mobile weather apps on the market and the National Weather Service’s iNWS service to compare to typical WEA text-only warnings. The study therefore investigates WEA weather warning message effectiveness across one of four conditions: (1) WEA (text-only) alert; (2) WEA text+NWS warning polygon; (3) WEA text+radar image; and (4) WEA text+warning polygon+radar image. Participants were told they were driving through an unknown region of the US. The researchers asked participants to assess the perceived risk, perceived severity, and likelihood to contact a loved one for each message. The results indicate the decisions did not differ as a function of warning type. Also, the participants’ times to make the three decisions were equivalent across all four types of messages.

Linking Communication Competence With Call Center Agents’ Sales Effectiveness

Scholars have conducted studies to uncover the knowledge, skills, and abilities that successful salespeople demonstrate on the job. However, much of this research focuses on face-to-face, and not mediated, sales environments. The present study addresses this gap in the literature by using an expert panel of judges who develop a 10-item scale that measures call center agents’ sales communication competence. Then, the author uses sales conversion rates to stratify the total employee population (45 agents who work in a service plus sales-type account) into a smaller sample that consists of two groups: the top 75% quartile of agents (First-in-Metric) and the bottom 25% quartile of agents (Last-in-Metric). The First-in-Metric group included 8 agents and the Last-in-Metric group included 10 agents. The results of the study suggest that 5 of the 10 Sales Communication Instrument items distinguish the First-in-Metric from the Last-in-Metric agent groups. More precisely, First-in-Metric agents on the account: spoke at an appropriate rate; emphasized important points with changes in pitch and volume; acknowledged or paraphrased what the customer said; used short, affirmative words and sounds to indicate that he/she listened to the customer; and used language the customer could understand. The article closes with the implications the study has for applied communication scholars, as well as for practitioners who work in the global call center industry.

Book Review: Thinking and Interacting Like a Leader: The TILL System for Effective Interpersonal Communication, by Kim Sydow Campbell. Chicago: Parlay Press, 2006. 141 pp

For practicing managers, choosing what to say to employees, especially in difficult situations, can be a challenge. On one hand, managers must ensure that their employees complete their assigned job tasks. Then again, managers who focus too much on the (task-related) dimension of communication risk offending their employees. What are managers to do? Several popular press titles have appeared recently on the market that offer business managers advice about what to say at work. The American Management Association, for example, has published two such titles recently—one by Holtz (2003) and the other by Falcone (2005). To take one of these two examples, Falcone’s handbook, 2600 Phrases for Effective Performance Reviews: Ready-to-Use Words and Phrases That Really Get Results, offers managers a laundry list of prescriptive communication advice. Enlightened readers, however, are apt to become frustrated with such books because their authors fail to back up their advice with any grounding in communication theory. Lewin’s (1951) argument that “there is nothing so practical as a good theory” seems lost in the mass-marketed business communication genre. Luckily, Kim Sydow Campbell, who most recently edited IEEE [Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers] Transactions on Professional Communication, has written a new book that delivers on this promise. Campbell’s book, Thinking and Interacting Like a Leader, is written to help first-level supervisors and managers become better communicators. The thesis of the book is straightforward. Effective managers, she argues, understand employees’ need to be treated fairly and given appropriate levels of autonomy to perform their jobs. Further, successful managers formally recognize their employees and praise them for the contributions they make to the organization. Managers, of course, cannot always deliver good news to employees. Instead, managers often face circumstances where they must issue directives to ensure that job tasks are completed quickly. There also are times