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Organizational leaders value effective communication in employees, but ineffective communication persists (Peart, 2019). Communication Skills Training (CST) programs often face time and engagement constraints (Wright et al., 2006), necessitating increased resources for improvement. This study investigates the fields in which communication skills are examined and the research methods used. Given past training-communication associations, it explores CST programs' positive impact through experimental research (Bakker & van Wingerden, 2021). The study aims to enhance CST research by providing insights into effective training methods for facilitators and practitioners.

This systematic literature review examines CST's effectiveness in improving employee communication outcomes and identifying key factors. It highlights the importance of communication training, provides insights into existing research, and identifies areas for future investigation. As communication training is not context-specific, a comprehensive understanding of its effectiveness is necessary. This review establishes a foundational framework to support the creation of impactful training programs.

This research reaffirms the importance of Communication Skills Training (CST) in enhancing key competencies such as communication competence, self-efficacy, and empathy for workplace success, benefiting collaboration, conflict resolution, and problem-solving. It provides a foundational understanding of CST's impact, serving as a resource for researchers, trainers, and leaders, while also emphasizing the need for further research, including larger experiments, diverse skill sets, and long-term assessment. In our digital age, exploring contemporary skills, including digital communication, is essential for comprehensive training. The systematic categorization of skills into intrapersonal and interactional dimensions ensures consistency and supports in-depth analysis.

To address the broad range, outcome skills were categorized as intrapersonal or interactional, excluding the behavioral aspect concerning societal improvement. Leveraging Zimmerman's (1995) empowerment theory to enhance focus, this framework provides value for diverse CST research outcomes. Intrapersonal encompassed self-views, like self-efficacy and knowledge, while interactional involved understanding and aligning exchanges with personal goals. This categorization enhances research clarity and effectiveness by systematically understanding how these skills are related.

This conceptual article provides a basis for designing leader development programs that assess and train leaders to recognize demands for communication and how their personality affects the ways they transmit information, influence others and form positive relationships.

Adult attachment theory, Big Five personality dimensions (extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to experience and neuroticism) and pro-social and social sensitivity personality traits are proposed to shape the extent to which leaders enact relational, transmission and manipulative models of communication. These personality dimensions and communication models are the basis for assessment and training leaders to use in-person and various electronic media in ways that promote listeners’ attention, understanding and psychological safety.

Secure attachment leaders who are extraverted, prosocial and socially sensitive are proposed to use high touch media to communicate in ways that establish positive relationships. Avoidant and anxious attachment leaders use low-touch media that are manipulative or mitigate accountability.

The behaviors associated with transmitting information, influencing others and forming relationships can be a basis for assessing leaders’ attachment styles. Leaders can learn to diagnose situations to determine the best mixes of communication models to meet the demands of the situation.

Leaders who are promoted to higher levels of responsibility need to learn how to communicate with multiple stakeholders often during times of challenge and stress. How they communicate is likely to be a function of their comfort with interpersonal relationships, which in turn affects their use of personal and impersonal media.

Consumers send billions of messages with high ephemerality each day, yet the effects of this type of communication are relatively unknown. Online ephemeral communication refers to sending and receiving information with a predetermined, finite lifespan in computer-mediated environments. The purpose of this paper is to conceptually understand online marketing communications with high ephemerality relative to messages with low ephemerality within a consumer’s goal system.

This paper is an attempt to conceptually understand how high ephemerality differs from low ephemerality, particularly as online ephemeral communication has emerged and is widely used by consumers and firms. Goal systems theory is applied to understand how ephemerality is a means for consumers to reach their communication goals.

Consumers are more likely to use messages with high ephemerality to impress with narrowly relevant content, regulate emotions, build social relationships, persuade others through peripheral cues and protect privacy, but messages with high ephemerality are less likely to help consumers manage their impression, acquire or share useful information or present strong arguments. It is also proposed that messages with high ephemerality can help marketers increase interest through frequent peripheral cues, including fun and friendly content, drive sales by creating a sense of urgency and increase loyalty, but are less likely to increase awareness, build interest through flattering or informative content or drive sales through transactional messages.

This study primarily advances the goal systems literature by introducing ephemerality. The defining feature of ephemerality, lifespan, also has research implications for studies of word-of-mouth marketing. The propositions in this study are ready for empirical investigation as to when consumers and firms choose to send messages with low or high ephemerality.

Firms need to understand how consumers are using messages sent with low and high ephemerality in order for firms to best move consumers through the sales funnel.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first paper to differentiate messages with low and high ephemerality, identify the presence and effects of ephemerality in offline and online communication and explain how and why sending messages with low or high ephemerality can help consumers and firms reach their communication goals. There is only one other paper in marketing on ephemerality in online marketing communications and no other conceptual work.

This paper aims to investigate the role of the service provider in determining customer satisfaction in sharing economy services. The authors sought to examine how the intrinsic and extrinsic cues along with their interactions influence customer satisfaction.

This research uses a mixed-methods design to test the hypotheses. Study 1 uses secondary data from Inside Airbnb. Study 2 uses a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subject experimental design.

Both studies support the confirmation bias perspective over the expectancy-confirmation perspective in explaining the interplay among different cues in determining customer satisfaction. In the context of Airbnb, in the absence of a Superhost badge, if hosts adopt a reactive communication style, physical presence has a greater impact on customer satisfaction compared to virtual presence.

This study extends the services marketing literature and cue utilization theory by investigating the dynamic interactions among multiple intrinsic and extrinsic service cues. It shed new light on how a combination of these cues may become additive or redundant in determining customer satisfaction. This study contributes to the services marketing literature by addressing the interactive nature of sharing economy services and the neglected role of service providers.

This study aims to explore how communication visibility affects employees’ work engagement from the negative perspective of employees’ perceived overload in the context of enterprise social media (ESM) and the role of ESM policies in the relationship between communication visibility and perceived overload.

This study examines how communication visibility (i.e. message transparency and network translucence) affects employees’ perceived overload (i.e. information overload and social overload), which in turn affects employees’ work engagement, and how ESM policies moderate the relationship between communication visibility and perceived overload. Partial least squares (PLS) analysis was conducted on data gathered from 224 ESM users in workplaces.

Communication visibility has significant positive impacts on perceived overload, perceived overload has significant negative impacts on work engagement and ESM policies negatively moderate the relationships between communication visibility and perceived overload, except for the relationship between message transparency and social overload.

The findings provide new insights for organizational managers to formulate ESM policies to mitigate perceived overload and guidance for ESM developers to improve ESM functions to alleviate perceived overload.

This study provides empirical evidence to explain the role of communication visibility and perceived overload in employees’ work engagement, which contributes to the existing literature on the negative impacts of communication visibility.

The credibility crisis of science is a growing topic of investigation. This study approaches the problem from the sustainability of the scholarly communication system by merging argumentation with information science.

Coding and content analysis drawing from a well-established textual argumentative tradition; a novel non-textual approach to complex communication and, an overlooked definition of sustainable information, were applied to 34 research works. The retrieval was carried out using Inciteful, a tool exploring literature networks. Additional information, such as keywords, mapping to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and citations were acquired through the OpenAlex API. Operationalisation of concepts from the theoretical framework underpinned the selection and analysis of documents.

Scholars virtually involve peers, funding agencies, research councils, policymakers, experts, practitioners and representatives of the public in their formal written production. The described coalitions are occasional, while the needed ones are deep. Three forms of scholarly communication were found: traditional, dialogical and complex depending on the involved audiences. The sample tells us about the sustainability of the scientific communication system and the impact it may have on the public construction of imaginaries of science.

This investigation frames scholars, their products and societies as intertwined dialogical entities constantly communicating and impacting each other. Direct and indirect forms of scholarly communications are addressed too, showing how poor sustainability in these processes may entail a failure to reach different layers of societies.

The term strategic communication has become firmly established in recent years. The emergence of the term was associated with the hope of finding a more fitting description for overlapping communication processes, since existing approaches can hardly fulfill these expectations. To date, the research has been dominated by communication-focused and, in particular, organization-focused approaches that show little interest in the alternative perspective. An integrating perspective can overcome the wall that exists between the communication level and the organizational level.

The integrating communication and organizational theory framework is developed on the basis of Niklas Luhmann’s “Theory of Social Systems” (TSS), which can be attributed to the “Communication Constitutes Organization” (CCO) perspective. This perspective seems appropriate because its communication theory integrates the sender and addressee perspectives, and its extended organization theory can be used to describe in detail the organizational structures of strategic communication.

The communication theoretical framework states that one of the functions of strategic communication is to reduce complexity to a single follow-up option. From the sender’s perspective, strategic communication can be defined as an attempt to encourage acceptance of a follow-up option proposed out of self-interest. The organizational theory framework that both builds on this and is linked to it first shows the diversity of strategic organizational communications before explaining their formal and informal structures.

This paper is the first to offer a comprehensive framework that integrates concrete strategic communication activities as well as the (in)formal organizational structures that lead to their emergence. On the one hand, this enables a more differentiated description of all relevant aspects of communication theory (e.g. tonality, clarity vs. ambiguity and technical dissemination medium). On the other, the organizational theoretical framework offers a systematization that can be used to describe various formal and informal structures comparatively. Above all, this kind of inclusive, integrating framework is the prerequisite for research that relates the diverse concrete strategic communication activities to an organization’s formal and informal rules and thus understands them as (primarily) the result of organizational decisions.

This study aims investigate the effects of electronic human resource management (e-HRM) on communication pace and processing time reduction through the mediation of organizational agility. The study also investigates the moderating role of technological attitude (TA) on the relationship between e-HRM and organizational agility.

The data was collected from 331 information and communication technology (ICT) companies – one respondent from each company working in the Human Resource Management (HRM) department. The data was analyzed through the partial least square structural equational model (PLS-SEM) using WarpPLS7.0 software to test the study’s hypotheses.

We found that e-HRM has positive significant effects on communication pace and processing time reduction through the mediation of organizational agility. Furthermore, TA is found to be positively moderating the relationship between e-HRM and organizational agility.

The study adds significant value to the existing knowledge base on e-HRM by providing empirical insights about the role of e-HRM in optimizing the communication pace and processing time of today’s businesses.

The study also provides invaluable insights to practitioners to replace conventional HR systems with e-HRM to better perform HR functions by optimizing communication pace and processing time in the current fast-paced era.

E-HRM has become an issue of great significance in the contemporary corporate landscape to improve operational efficiency. Despite its widespread adoption in the corporate world, empirical evidence on e-HRM, particularly on its consequences, is still inconclusive.

Mergers are an increasingly popular method to grow a business despite the fact that many fail to meet their pre-deal expectations. This paper outlines the benefits, and argues in favor, of managerial commitment to a well-defined, strategic communications plan from inception through completion of an organizational merger. The authors propose training leaders in areas such as cultural communication, crisis communication, and shared governance prior to developing an M&A-specific communication plan.

This article is primarily an integrative theoretical piece, drawing on prior literature and secondary research sources while also integrating the authors’ academic and industry experience to offer best-practices for enhancing organizational communication efforts pre- and during mergers and acquisitions.

There are many financial and structural issues that can result in a failed merger. However, even when a deal makes sense financially M&A’s still have a relatively low success rate. These failures are often people related. Two significant issues are presented; culture conflicts related to communication, and uncertainty of a changing environment. Communication is the key to a successful M&A. If effective communication is deployed pre-M&A and during integration, it can greatly reduce the chance of failure.

This report offers a novel approach to decreasing the likelihood of M&A failure, focusing specifically on people-specific causes of hindrance. It outlines two of the significant human-related issues; culture conflicts and uncertainty reduction, both as related to organizational communication.

Research on leaders’ knowledge management systems focuses exclusively on how leaders gather and disseminate knowledge in collaboration with external actors. Not much is known about how leaders address the psychological aspects of employees and strategize internal communication. In addition, while previous work has treated high uncertainty as a default feature of crisis, this study aims to propose that perceived uncertainty varies in experience/meaning and has a crucial bearing on the relative balance of cognitive/emotional load on the leader and behavioral/psychological responses.

The authors contribute by qualitatively examining the role of leader knowledge systems in designing communication strategies in the context of the COVID-19 crisis by investigating communication characteristics, style, modes and the relatively unaddressed role of compassion/persuasion. In this pursuit, the authors interviewed 21 C-suite leaders, including chief executive officers, chief marketing officers, chief financial officers, chief human resource officers and founders, and analyzed their data using open, axial and selective coding, which were later extracted for representative themes and overarching dimensions.

Drawing from grounded theory research, the authors present a framework of knowledge systems and their resultant communication with employees in high uncertain and low uncertain crises. The authors highlight interactions of a set of concepts – leaders’ preparedness, leaders’ support to employees tailored communication adapted to perceived uncertainty, leading to enhanced trust – in the achievement of outcomes related to balancing operational and relational systems with employees. The findings suggest that a structured process of communication helps employees mitigate any concern related to uncertainty and feel confident in their leadership.

The research has implications for leaders in managing their knowledge systems, for human esources practitioners in designing effective internal communication programs, as well as for scholars in knowledge management, communication and leadership.