Ryan S. Bisel

Discursive positioning and planned change in organizations

This study uses discursive positioning theory to explore how planned change messages influence organizational members’ identity and the way they experienced organizational change. Based on an in-depth case study of a home healthcare and hospice organization that engaged in a multiyear planned change process, our analysis suggests that workers experienced salient change messages as constituting unfavorable identities, which were associated with the experiences of violation, recitation, habituation, or reservation. Our study also explores the way discursive and material contexts enabled and constrained the governing board’s change messages as they responded to external and internal audiences. We highlight the importance of viewing messaging as a process of information transfer as well as discursive construction, which has important implications for the way change agents approach issues of sense making, emotionality, resistance, and materiality during planned change processes.

Supervisor-Subordinate Communication Hierarchical Mum Effect Meets Organizational Learning

The authors provide nine propositions regarding the function and effects of supervisor-subordinate communication to encourage business communication researchers to go beyond a unidimensional view of this workplace relationship. Taken together, these propositions represent an argument that connects and clarifies the associations between micro-level supervisor-subordinate communication behaviors and macro-level organizational learning. We explain how command structures produce relational contexts that create consequences for communication behaviors between subordinates and their supervisors. Specifically, we explain how subordinates’ reluctance to disagree with supervisors results in silence or equivocation—what the authors label the hierarchical mum effect. In turn, we describe how this organizational suppression of dissent produces a barrier to organizational learning and adaptation.

A Communicative Ontology of Organization? A Description, History, and Critique of CCO Theories for Organization Science

Writing as an organizational communication scholar, I provide a brief description and history of theories encapsulated by the phrase communication is constitutive of organizing (CCO). Then, I explain that CCO theory would benefit from an explicit differentiation between which conditions are prerequisite to and which conditions ensure the constitution of organization. Specifically, I argue that communication may be better thought of as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for organizing.

Making Sense of Organizational Members’ Silence: A Sensemaking-Resource Model

This study presents a sensemaking-resource model of employee silence. Working adults (N = 180) provided retrospective accounts of a decision to refrain from giving upward negative feedback. Constant comparative analysis revealed workers justified their silence as a reasonable course of action by drawing on 2 sensemaking resources: expectation and identity. Emanating from these resources, participants gave 5 reasons for remaining silent: (a) predicting harm to themselves, (b) constructing the supervisor as responsible, (c) questioning their own expertise, (d) predicting supervisors’ deafness, and (e) constructing timing as inopportune. The study concludes with implications for organizational silence research.

On a Growing Dualism in Organizational Discourse Research

Duality arguments are now a common perspective employed in organizational discourse research to avoid the problematic dualism of necessarily prioritizing structure or agency. Despite this considerable philosophical maturity, not all duality approaches are created equal. In fact, duality theorizing in current organizational discourse research has developed into two perspectives— structured in action or acted in structure. This article outlines the characteristics of each research program and provides an illustration of how similar organizational phenomena may be interpreted differently depending on paradigmatic orientation. Then, methodological recommendations and two emerging theoretical myopias—duality and organizing biases—are described to challenge scholars to employ dialectically these seemingly incommensurate perspectives in their theorizing of 21st-century organizational discourse.

Hierarchical Mum Effect: A New Investigation of Organizational Ethics

In this language production experiment, working adults (N = 226) were asked to respond to unethical business requests. Our objective was to advance a communicative understanding of unethical organizational behaviors by analyzing the linguistic adjustments workers employ to deny unethical requests. Specifically, we measured responses to unethical requests on a continuous coding scheme, which captured degrees of denial directness. We hypothesized that command structures produce a hierarchical mum effect in which subordinates are more indirect in denying an unethical request than supervisors and coworkers. Results confirmed the presence of a hierarchical mum effect; data also indicated that females, younger workers, and those with the least work experience are most indirect in denying an unethical request.

A Round-Table Discussion of “Big” Data in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research

The forum guest editor Ryan Bisel in this issue takes on the topic of big data and presents a round table that grew out of a conference panel. Five scholars engage in a discussion of the social and cultural trend of big data and implications to qualitative organizational communication research. The contributors respond to questions and delve into a number of issues, from theoretical, to institutional, to operational, to practical, by sharing thoughts and experiences about definition, assumptions, theory building, execution at every stage of a big data project and reflections beforehand and afterward.

Organizational and Supervisory Apology Effectiveness: Apology Giving in Work Settings

We synthesize the interdisciplinary literature into a heuristic for crafting effective organizational and supervisory apologies (the OOPS four-component apology). In the first experiment, we demonstrate how an offense committed by an organization is perceived to be more egregious than an offense committed by a friend or supervisor. Furthermore, results did not support that OOPS apologies are unequally effective if issued by a friend, supervisor, or organization. In the second experiment, we test OOPS apology-training effectiveness. Results indicated that trained participants crafted more effective apologies. Our apology heuristic is an innovation for training business communicators how to apologize effectively.

The Role of Identification in Giving Sense to Unethical Organizational Behavior Defending the Organization

This language production experiment investigates communication’s role in defending, and therefore giving sense to, organizational wrongdoing. The study suggests identification may possibly reduce organizations’ moral learning capacity by encouraging highly identified members to engage in ethical sensegiving of their organizations’ wrongdoing in defensive ways. Working adults (N = 318) responded to an organizational outsider regarding a gender discrimination lawsuit filed against their organization in one of two scenarios, which presented the organization’s guilt as either ambiguous or certain. Highly identified members used more linguistic defense mechanisms and reported more intense feelings. Additionally, participants in the ambiguous condition used more linguistic defense mechanisms than those in the certain condition. Veteran members reported higher levels of organizational identification and used more linguistic defense mechanisms than newcomers.

Understanding Organizational Culture and Communication through a Gyroscope Metaphor

To fill a critical void in organizational culture pedagogy, the authors present an instructional system that employs the metaphor of a gyroscope to help students understand implicit assumptions in culture research. Working from Martin’s nexus approach to organizational culture and Fairhurst and Putnam’s tripartite theory of organizational discourse, the system in this study illustrates three interpretations of the relationships between culture and communication implicit in the literature. Each relationship is defined, exemplified with culture research, and critiqued. Pedagogical applications of the gyroscope metaphor are also outlined.