Robyn C. Walker

A Comparison of Traditional and Technology-Assisted Instructional Methods in the Business Communication Classroom

In their study of 261 students enrolled in eight sections of a business communication course, three taught in a traditional classroom setting and the others delivered in a hybrid, half-time online format, the authors found that all students measurably improved their writing skills. On another dimension of interest, however, students in the online hybrid course demonstrated a higher rate of active learning practices in their use of Blackboard course management software. Perhaps most important, online writing instruction yielded as significant levels of measurable improvement in writing as did instruction in a traditional classroom, provided that instructional materials corresponded to the particular needs of the students. These results are encouraging in indicating that online courses may provide the best form of course delivery for certain students and certain communication practices.

Cognitive Organization and Identity Maintenance in Multicultural Teams A Discourse Analysis of Decision-Making Meetings

Measuring culture is a central issue in international management research and has been traditionally accomplished using indices of cultural values. Although a number of researchers have attempted to identify measures to account for the core elements of culture, there is no consensus on those measures. This article uses an alternative method—discourse analysis—to observe what actually occurs in terms of communication practices in intercultural decision-making meetings, specifically those involving U.S.-born native English speakers and participants from East Asian countries. Previous discourse studies in this area suggest that differences in communication practices may be attributed to power differentials or language competence. Our findings suggest that the conversation style differences we observed might be attributed to intergroup identity issues instead.

Leadership Styles in Multicultural Groups: Americans and East Asians Working Together

The global economy has created new realities for businesses, and the need for understanding differing communication practices and cultural values is greater than ever, particularly with regard to the surging economies in the East. Working in multicultural work groups is a new workplace reality that has created a greater need to understand how to lead these groups to maximize the quality and effectiveness of multicultural group work. Cultural differences exist regarding the importance and value of leadership. Still, much remains to be understood as to the way in which culture influences leadership and organizational processes. To what extent do cultural forces influence the expectations that individuals have for leaders and their behavior, for instance? What principles of leadership and organizational processes transcend cultures? This article is primarily directed to an American audience and uses a discursive leadership approach to provide a better understanding of how different leadership styles affect group member interaction in multicultural groups involving participants from American and East Asian cultures. Our results demonstrate that differing discursive leadership styles can affect the participation and contribution of members and may affect their feelings of inclusion and satisfaction within the group. Our results also provide evidence that particular styles of and approaches to leadership may not be as successful with all cultural groups.

Women Doing Leadership: Leadership Styles and Organizational Culture

Although women in the United States make up about half of the workforce, only 14.6% of executive officer positions in the Fortune 500 and 16.9% of Fortune 500 board of director seats in 2013 were held by women, numbers that have remained flat for the past decade. Decades after the so-called “feminist revolution,” women are still struggling to be seen as leaders within organizations even though many have put in place hiring and recruitment policies to help eliminate this problem. Our study examines this disparity by observing how leadership emerges and is negotiated in discourse among male and female participants in decision-making groups in a masculine organizational culture. First, it identifies whether female participants randomly assigned to mixed-gender groups emerge as leaders. Second, it analyzes the discourse of those competing for leadership positions in mixed groups to identify the effects of leadership style on leader attribution by others. Of the 22 mixed-gender groups (N = 110) that took part in our study, no woman emerged as the unanimously chosen leader, even though women were identified as leaders by transcript coders. This article uses a case study approach to analyze leadership emergence in two mixed groups in which women were recognized by some members as demonstrating leadership. It then looks at a third case that demonstrates how some discourse behaviors that have been recognized as leadership may not be viewed as such in a masculine organizational culture. Study results illustrate how organizational culture can define accepted ways of “doing” leadership and affect who is and who is not recognized as a leader, particularly in terms of gender.

Discourse of Leadership: The Power of Questions in Organizational Decision Making

This study aims to more fully understand leadership when it is understood as primarily discursive in nature and coconstructed by those involved in interactions in which influence emerges. More specifically, it explores the performative role of questions as speech acts. In this case, we look at how questions are employed as a key discourse type to enable professionals to construct their authority and establish leadership roles. The data consist of transcripts of decision-making meetings. A scheme for coding the question-response sequence in conversation was used to identify the form, social function, and conversational sequence of question use. The questions then were analyzed by speaker and his or her role as leader versus nonleader. While questions can result in or encourage group collaboration by opening the discussion and inviting contributions, they can also be used to direct team members, seize the floor, and influence decision making. The study contributes to the study of leadership and team decision making by looking at how questions operate as a multifunctional discourse type, and how they are used to establish influence in decision-making meetings.

Enhancing Global Virtual Small Group Communication Skills

Abstract VBP –Virtual Business Professional project was designed to give students real-world experience using communication and collaboration technologies employed in today’s corporate environment to collaborate with team members located around the globe. It uses intercultural workgroup communication theory (Oetzel, 2005) and focuses on communication processes that occur in a multicultural workgroup and affect the workgroup outcomes. Previous studies showed that culturally diverse groups experience significant communication problems and do not reach their performance potential (Earley & Gibson, 2002; Earley & Mosakoski, 2000; Jehn, Northcraft, & Neale, 1999; Ravlin, Thomas, & Ilsev, 2000). Students plan and hold virtual meetings, co-author and collaboratively revise documents, use project management tools, and create business documents. The project started in 2015 as a small collaboration between three schools and two countries, and in spring 2017, it included 415 students and 71 teams from 9 universities and 7 countries. The project uses the functional approach to small group communication to build intercultural communication competence (Deardorff, 2009), and teaches students to work successfully in virtual multicultural teams. The case study will provide an overview of the teaching methodology of the project and discuss how the functional approach applied to the virtual multicultural team project improves (1) team member satisfaction with the project; (2) team coordination, and (3) builds trust in multicultural teams. These measures were chosen to account for three dimensions of measuring the effectiveness of task-oriented groups, (a) task effectiveness, (b) relational effectiveness, and (c) personal effectiveness.

Media Use in Virtual Teams of Varying Levels of Coordination

This study was undertaken to provide a more complete understanding of how the selection of various media in virtual team settings affects student team coordination. A total of 75 teams of 304 undergraduate participants took part in the study. Participants were asked to complete surveys before and after the project. Findings suggest that well-coordinated teams appeared to have anticipated the usefulness of social networking and richer communication channels earlier in the project than less well-coordinated teams. After engaging in virtual teamwork, team members identified rich and social channels as more effective while finding less rich channels to be less effective.

Book Review: Managing risk and complexity: Through open communication and teamworkTompkinsP. K. (2015). Managing risk and complexity: Through open communication and teamwork. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. 276 pp.

This book provides an easily readable summary of the work completed in the field of organizational communication by Phillip K. Tompkins, professor emeritus at Purdue University. After receiving his PhD in organizational communication from Purdue in 1962, Tompkins was a consultant to NASA working under the legendary Wernher von Braun during the development of the Saturn V (the “moon rocket”). Based on that experience, he published two books on his time at NASA and his involvement in the space program. More recently, he has worked as a volunteer at the St. Francis Center, a homeless shelter in Denver, Colorado, resulting in a book about homelessness in the United States. In Managing Risk and Complexity, Tompkins draws on these experiences, and others, to present a theory of what he calls “open communication and teamwork.” This theory is drawn from work began in 1984 to present a theory of “concertive control,” which he and his co-researcher, George Cheney, believed “captured the essence of participatory, democratic decision making” (p. viii). The theory of concertive control has been criticized, though, for achieving the exact opposite. For example, in his study published in 1993 in Administrative Science Quarterly, James R. Barker of Marquette University concluded that

Group Composition and Communication Styles: An Analysis of Multicultural Teams in Decision-Making Meetings

This study analyzes multicultural teams in decision-making meetings and uses discourse analysis and observational methods to study how member participation in meetings changes when teams are comprised of multicultural members. We use a four-by-four design to document differences in discourse patterns of teams of different composition. Our findings suggest that among high-proficiency English speakers of East Asian origin, there are no significant cultural differences in the discourse patterns when compared to US-born English speakers when speaking English and working in homogeneous groups. However, differences in discourse patterns do emerge when members are combined in mixed groups. Americans tend to increase their participation while East Asians withdraw. The paper examines possible causes of this divergence in communication styles and outlines directions for future research.