The Hidden Side of Transparency among Government Agency Bloggers

This paper shows and discusses blogs as social action in a corporate context by investigating and seeking to understand organizational bloggers’ motivations and discursive behaviors in the contextual and cultural diversity of a\ud blog-setting. Providing empirical findings on the possibilities and limitations that are embedded in an organizational blog in a government agency context, traced\ud through focus group interviews of the organizational bloggers, the paper shows that culturally bound limitations exist and are exposed when implementing an open-source social technology like the weblog. People, even within the same organization, have different goals in relation to the same technology, and the transparency of the blog and the blog comments is managed differently by the internal bloggers. Through the discussion of the different cultural discourses at work in the blog, diverging roles and dilemmas that the blogging employees meet when engaging in corporate blogging are exposed and discussed. The aim of the paper is to discuss the social implications of these different cultural discourses in a corporate blog and how corporate cultural tensions emerge because of the blog. The paper pinpoints the problematic of transparency through pointing out conflicting goals, roles and the resulting self-censorship by bloggers as they operate in an environment that is increasingly transparent, and shows examples of\ud how the group of bloggers with the shared narrative tradition is able to mobilize its members and create subgroups for appropriate blog behaviors and changing\ud behavior due to self-censorship, as well as identification with the key actors in the group

Higher Education Marketing Through Digital Community: Understanding the Motivations of Joining and Participating in University-Sponsored Communities and the Effect on Yield.

As enrollment goals and student informational resources increase, universities are scrambling to be more competitive in the marketplace and implement more effective enrollment strategies. Digital closed online communities are one new method universities are using to reach students. Using an online survey, the authors investigated the motivations behind why students join these communities and how they participate in them. In addition, the research also tested how variables correlated to and predicted a student’s behavioral intention to yield, or enroll at, the university. Findings expand Situational Theory of Problem Solving literature and establish connections between certain attributes and enrolling at the university. Specifically, students who had a clear plan to make their college decision, joined the closed online community, and reported more communicative action in the closed online community also reported a higher behavioral intention to enroll at the university associated with the app

Employer reviews may say as much about the employee as they do the employer: Online disclosures, organizational attachments, and unethical behavior

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Applied Communication Research on 02 Sep 202002 Sep 2020, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00909882.2020.1812692.Do reviews on organizational review websites (e.g., Indeed.com, GlassDoor.com) speak to the employer or the employee? This study tests the structural relationship between cognitive and affective organizational attachments and three outcomes: willingness to disclose one’s workplace online, unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB), and workplace reviews. Using a national sample of U.S. workers (N = 304), we examine how organizational identification and commitment relate to publicly posting about one’s organization. Self-presentation and organizational attachment are used to hypothesize how individuals selectively self-present organizational identities online. Structural equation modeling shows identification and commitment both positively relate to review ratings. While identification positively predicts online disclosure and UPB, commitment is unrelated to disclosure and has a buffering effect whereby it negatively predicts UPB and interacts with UPB to predict organizational review ratings. Findings illustrate that online reviews and disclosures of one's workplace may say as much about the worker as the workplace itself

Cross-Cultural Communication within American and Chinese Colleagues in Multinational Organizations

Globalization is a mantra nowadays that has been employed to describe the highly active exchange activities between countries and regions across the globe. It takes a multidimensional form, connecting people and things regardless of spatial and temporal confines, and permeating into all walks of life. Along with changes brought by this dynamic international interaction, a myriad of organizations, no longer isolated and static, are beginning to ride on this gravy train by expanding tentacles into every cranny and nook of the globe. One of the challenges that is facing the multinational organizations is the increasing diversity of the workforce and similarly complex prospective customers with disparate cultural backgrounds. After all, language barriers, cultural nuances, and value divergence can easily cause unintended misunderstanding and low efficiency in internal communication in a multinational environment. It leads to conflict among employees and profit loss in organizational productivity. Therefore, in international organization, cross-cultural communication, also known as intercultural and trans-cultural communication, serves as a lubricant, which mitigates frictions, resolves conflicts, and improves overall work efficiency; likewise, it serves as coagulant, which integrates the collective wisdom and strength, enhances the collaboration of team work, and unites multiple cultures together between race and ethnicity, which leads to desirable virtuous circle of synergy effect. This paper identifies three aspects of culture that constitute people’s understanding between each other in professional settings, namely, language and non-language code; cultural values and beliefs; as well as cultural stereotypes and preconceptions

On The Role Of Normative Influences In Commercial Virtual Communities

The potential to reconcile economic benefits to the firm with the social needs of customers has made commercial virtual communities a popular tool for companies to support their core products/service with a value-added service option. An important key to the success of such a virtual community is the behavior of its members. In this paper, we develop a framework of pro-social behavior (i.e., community citizenship behavior and contribution intentions) for understanding and explaining the motivation of virtual community members to actively participate in and care for the community. We show that the main determinants of pro-social behavior are the social norm of reciprocity and the personal norm of obligation. Reciprocity, in turn, is impacted by the value of the information and the socio-emotional support exchanged by the virtual community members.marketing ;

Authentic enterprise, communal employee relationship, and employee-generated managerial assets

This study aims to explore managerial intangible assets of organizations generated by their internal publics, employees. Considering employees’ perception and communicative behaviors as an organization’s managerial assets, this study examines an organization’s authentic behaviors and organization-employee relationships. To be more specific, this study firstly investigates how an organization’s authentic behavior—truthfulness, transparency, and consistency—affects communal relationship between employees and an organization. Using megaphoning, scouting, and microboundary spanning as theoretical frameworks for employees’ communicative behaviors (ECB), this study also examines the association among perceived authenticity of organizational behavior, organization-employee relationships, and employees’ communicative actions. Furthermore, this study investigates how employees perceive an organization’s excellence based on relationship. With two given datasets including 528 and 306 current employees who are working full-time in the United States and Italy, respectively, this study tests the same three structural models and compare the results. Results suggest that an organization’s authentic behavior is positively related to organization-employee relationship as well as employees’ communicative behaviors (ECB), not only across organizations but also within an organization. Employees who have communal relationship with their organization are also more likely to perceive their organization as excellent. The results of this study have both theoretical and practical implications in that it helps to understand how organization-employee relationship and ECB contribute to Excellence in public relations and employee communication