Karen K. Myers

Millennials in the Workplace: A Communication Perspective on Millennials' Organizational Relationships and Performance

Stereotypes about Millennials, born between 1979 and 1994, depict them as self-centered, unmotivated, disrespectful, and disloyal, contributing to widespread concern about how communication with Millennials will affect organizations and how they will develop relationships with other organizational members. We review these purported characteristics, as well as Millennials’ more positive qualities—they work well in teams, are motivated to have an impact on their organizations, favor open and frequent communication with their supervisors, and are at ease with communication technologies. We discuss Millennials’ communicated values and expectations and their potential effect on coworkers, as well as how workplace interaction may change Millennials.

Cracking Jokes and Crafting Selves: Sensemaking and Identity Management Among Human Service Workers

Using interview and participant-observation data gathered among correctional officers, 911 call-takers, and firefighters, this study explores how humor enables human service workers to manage identity and make sense of their work in relation to preferred notions of self. In the face of trying job duties, humor serves employee identity needs through differentiation, superiority, role distance, and relief. Moreover, humor serves as a sensemaking vehicle through which employees select, maintain, reproduce, and reify preferred interpretations of work. The analysis characterizes humor as an unfolding, collaborative, and interactional practice that can play a key part in socializing newcomers, building knowledge, and constituting the organizing process.

Exploring the dimensions of organizational assimilation: Creating and validating a measure

The purpose of this study was to create and validate a measure of organizational assimilation index. Organizational assimilation describes the interactive mutual acceptance of newcomers into organizational settings. Members from the advertising, banking, hospitality, university, nonprofit, and publishing industries participated in two phases of research. In the first phase, 13 interviewees suggested six dimensions of organizational assimilation: familiarity with others, organizational acculturation, recognition, involvement, job competency, and adaptation/role negotiation. The second phase involved analysis of a survey of 342 participants that appeared to validate the six dimensions. The OAIs construct validity was tested and supported through the use of three other scales. Job satisfaction and organizational identification related positively to assimilation, while propensity to leave related negatively.

The Socialization of Emotion: Learning Emotion Management at the Fire Station

In a variety of fields, particularly human service occupations, the management of emotion is a precondition of employee and client well being. Based on qualitative data from participant observation and interviews, this study examines how firefighters are socialized to manage feelings and emotional displays. It concludes that firefighters recognized a need to manage their own emotions and those of their clients in order to deliver adequate service. Veteran firefighters facilitated the use of emotion labor techniques among newcomers by considering the emotion management knowledge and capabilities of job candidates during employee selection processes, providing habituated emotional events, and reinforcing customer service expectations. Newcomers actively participated in their own socialization to local emotion expectations through observational information seeking, retrospective surveillance, and performance of a normative newcomer role demeanor. The article concludes by offering practical and theoretical implications.

Examining the tensions in workplace flexibility and exploring options for new directions

Workplace flexibility initiatives as a potential remedy for work–life conflicts are the focus of a considerable number of investigations. Despite their contributions, research findings reveal tensions and contradictions in the ways that employees, managers and organizations develop, enact and respond to these flexibility initiatives. This critical review identifies three primary tensions (variable vs fixed arrangements, supportive vs unsupportive work climates and equitable vs inequitable implementation of policies) that reveal inconsistent and sometimes contradictory findings. We tie these tensions, and the management of them, to an overarching dilemma in implementing workplace flexibility, the autonomy–control paradox. To develop alternatives for handling these tensions, we recommend reframing them through changing organizational cultures, adopting a philosophy of adaptability, customizing work and making workplace flexibility an employee right. We conclude by urging organizations and society to reframe the tensions between work and life, to treat them as enriching rather than competing with each other and to transcend these opposite poles through exploring third spaces.

A Burning Desire Assimilation into a Fire Department

This study utilized Myers and Oetzel’s six-dimensional model of organizational assimilation as a framework to explore members’ assimilation into a highreliability organization (HRO)—14 stations of a fire department in a major U.S. city. Qualitative data were gathered from semistructured interviews and participant observation. Consistent with the Myers and Oetzel framework, new firefighters did develop a familiarity with others, acculturate, become involved, feel recognized, and develop job skills. The firefighters did not role negotiate, but they put considerable effort into establishing trustworthiness. Trust was built by demonstrating humility and a good work ethic. Furthermore, unlike newcomers to most non-HROs, newcomers were required to socialize themselves prior to entry. The study also reveals how a strong culture and environment affect informal socialization and offers additional evidence of the reciprocal nature of organizational assimilation. Implications and suggestions for future research are offered.

Interpersonal conflict in organizations: Explaining conflict styles via face‐negotiation theory

The purpose of the current study was to test the assumption of the face‐negotiation theory (Ting‐Toomey, 1988) that face concerns are predictive of conflict management styles. Managers and employees (N = 184) completed a self‐report questionnaire that asked them to describe their reactions to typical conflicts with either a peer or a person of different status. Self‐face concern was associated positively with dominating and emotionally expressive styles, other‐face concern was associated positively with integrating, obliging, and compromising styles, and mutual‐face concern was associated positively with integrating, obliging, and compromising styles. Additionally, inclusion of face concerns provided a better prediction than other relevant variables alone for six of the eight conflict styles considered.

Advancing Research in Organizational Communication Through Quantitative Methodology

This article showcases current best practices in quantitative organizational communication research. We emphasize their value in exploring issues of the day and their relation to other research approaches. Materials are presented around four themes: systematic development and validation of measures, including the use of mixed methods; multiple levels of analysis; the study of change and development over time; and relationships among people, units, organizations, and meanings.

Vocational Anticipatory Socialization (VAS): A Communicative Model of Adolescents' Interests in STEM

Models of career development have focused on important vocational influences such as self-efficacy, exposure, and gender prescriptions but have glossed over the role of communication in socializing adolescents toward or from various careers. We investigate academic interests in math and science and related career aspirations in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Drawing on data from 38 focus groups (241 students), the proposed Vocational Anticipatory Socialization (VAS) model of STEM depicts factors that influence adolescent academic-career interests including communication associated with gender prescriptions; cultural membership/socioeconomic status; experiences; personal factors (self-efficacy, exposure, resilience); and importantly, the sources and significance of VAS messages for the development of academic-career pursuits.

Organizational Assimilation Theory, Research, and Implications for Multiple Areas of the Discipline: A State of the Art Review

In examining the state of the art in organizational assimilation studies, we explicate specific linkages between work on assimilation in organizational contexts and other areas of the communication discipline. We define the construct, present an overview of the primary theoretical models that have directed research on organizational assimilation since the 1970s, and identify the major areas of research, discussing representative studies within each area. Throughout, we illustrate ways in which communication scholars in the areas of instructional/developmental, technology, mass media, health, intercultural/developmental, and group communication might draw from organizational assimilation research for a heightened understanding of their own variables of interest. Finally, based on an in-depth review of the literature in this area, the authors recommend intensified research attention to the antecedents to particular assimilation processes, development of research methods that would capture the dynamic and interactive nature of assimilation, and conscientious efforts by assimilation scholars to promote the utility of their work to researchers working in other areas of the field.