Workplace communication.

Deluliis, David

Introduction

More or less everyone--with the possible exception of hermits--lives or works in organizations. This foundation of contemporary life draws people together for all manner of activities, but particularly for work, whether paid work or voluntary work. We simply do not seem able to function in today's world without the organizations that bind and coordinate our efforts. Communication research has not ignored this aspect of our living.

Organizational communication study has long considered strategies for successful work communication, examining everything from the ideal make up of work groups to the patterns of superior-subordinate communication to measures of satisfaction with organizational life. Other studies look to larger issues like organizational identity and organizational culture. All of these approaches tend to see organizations as communication entities that somehow subsumed the individuals working within them.

More recent work has drawn on another strand of communication research--interpersonal communication--to study relationships in the workplace. A number of scholars report studies on the characteristics of successful working relationships. But not every relationship at work succeeds. Most people have encountered at one time or another in their working lives not only failures in communication--the mis-worded memo, the garbled telephone message, the ambiguous email, the undelivered letter, and so on. While each of these can cause problems for individuals and for the organization, most groups have learned to live with them and have developed corrective strategies. However, people also encounter another kind of communication failure: the harmful or even toxic communication that stems from painful or problematic relationships in the workplace. Here, too, communication scholars have described the characteristics of these relationships: bullying, free-riding, taking credit for more than one's due, so forth. Many find these kinds of problems more troubling--and having greater consequences--since these kinds of communication failure corrode the very things that make organizations successful and can damage the people in them.

A first step in understanding such phenomena comes with description. The next comes with theory. How might we understanding what makes workplace relationships and communication work? How might we get beyond a simple list of what works and what does not work? Here, too, a number of scholars have explored how to explain, predict, and ameliorate, if not prevent, negative workplace communication.

In this issue of Communication Research Trends, David DeIuliis and Sarah Flinko offer a review of one theoretical background that might explain both what succeeds and what does not: what they and their sources term, "professional civility." Their essay situates professional civility in a much larger theory of culture and social change, suggesting that highly homogeneous societies did not need rules for civility, but that contemporary heterogeneity does. They draw a parallel to the behavioral norms like etiquette that allow strangers to coexist peacefully and even fruitfully. Their more philosophical turn examines a social theory of complex culture. Civility eases the tensions among people, allowing communication to function more smoothly. Analogous in some ways to the presuppositions of meaning that make ordinary conversation possible, civility sets a kind of minimum expectation in complex social encounters, which demand cooperation and collaboration.

But, they note, the more diverse society becomes, lacking the classical grounding of a shared polis, the medieval ground of a shared religion, or the Enlightenment ground of a shared epistemology, the more difficulty people have in finding any commonality. Here they argue for professional civility as a solution.

David Deluliis, Ph.D., is Visiting Instructor in the Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. He has written for Trends before, previously reviewing gatekeeping theory in social networks (Volume 34, number 1, 2015). Sarah Flinko is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA.