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With a focus on millennial employees, this study investigates how employees engage in two types of employees' communicative behaviors (ECBs), that is, their voluntary communicative efforts to acquire and circulate tasks and managerial information (i.e. scouting) and to share and discuss positive and negative aspects of their organization with internal members (i.e. internal megaphoning). Through the lens of social exchange theory (SET) and symmetrical communication model, this study examines the effects of inclusive leadership and internal communication on active information behaviors of employees within their companies.

An online survey was conducted with fulltime millennial employees working across various industry sectors in the US.

Symmetrical internal communication influenced by inclusive leadership enhances employees' scouting behavior as well as positive internal megaphoning behavior. Positive and negative internal megaphoning with supervisors increases the scouting behavior of employees, whereas negative internal megaphoning with peers does not have a significant effect.

This study is among the first attempts to examine the effectiveness of leadership and strategic internal communication on millennial employees' diverse types of communicative behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of managerial strategies in promoting employee brand consistent behavior. Using a recently developed holistic model of behavioral branding, that suggests that a wide array of managerial strategies affects the branding process, this study addresses two specific questions: what communication strategies, in the opinion of managers, sustain employee brand consistent behavior? And what are the most important factors, both contextual and related to their cognitive-emotional states, that employees think affect their brand ambassadorship behavior?

A long-term research program was conducted based on a multiple methods research strategy to answer the two questions. The choice of different methods was mainly based on the specific characteristics of the two targets: communication managers and employees. The first one based on interviews with 32 managers, and the second one based on a case study of a single company.

The results show that enablement-oriented strategies are more effective than communication-oriented strategies in sustaining employee brand builder roles. Weak employee commitment, unsatisfactory external communication, and low levels of motivation are strong contextual factors inhibiting employee attitudes to brand ambassadorship, one of the most relevant employee brand consistent behaviors in competitive contexts. The main practical implication is that companies should engage employees as brand ambassadors, not by means of prescriptions of in-role behavior, but enablement strategies leading to authentic and voluntary behaviors; besides, that companies should put a significant effort in “preparing the soil,” i.e. investing in enhancing employee commitment, level of motivation, and understanding/alignment with the external communication.

The main practical implication is that companies should engage employees as brand ambassadors not by means of in-role behavior prescriptions rather by means of enablement strategies leading to authentic and voluntary behaviors. Besides, managers should invest significant efforts in enhancing employee motivation, commitment, and understanding/alignment to external communication as they represent key factors in sustaining brand ambassadorship behaviors.

The values of the study lies in having highlighted the crucial role of enablement-oriented strategies, and the relevance of specific contextual variables affecting the attitude of employee toward brand consistent behaviors.

This study aimed to examine how senior leadership influences corporate communication and employees' attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Using two-way symmetrical communication model in public relations and leadership theory, it investigated the effects of CEOs' task- and relationship-oriented leadership on symmetrical internal communication, employees' organizational commitment and communicative behaviors.

An online survey was conducted with 417 full-time employees working in various industries in the United States.

The results showed that CEOs' relationship-oriented leadership significantly influenced symmetrical internal communication, which, in turn, increased affective commitment and employees' scouting behavior. CEOs' task-oriented communication had no significant effect on symmetrical communication.

This study advances theoretical understanding of two-way symmetrical communication in relation to senior leadership and provides practical insights for corporate leaders and public relations practitioners regarding how to improve employee outcomes through CEOs' strategic leadership and internal communication practices.

As new work environments have been created and accelerated due to technological advances, after-hours work communication has become one of the prominent features of the technology-enabled work environment. Grounded in the conservation of resources theory, this study aims to uncover the effects of after-hours work communication through communication technologies on employees' burnout and extra-role behaviors.

The study conducted an online survey of 315 US full-time employees from a wide range of industrial sectors.

The findings of the study show that after-hours work communication through communication technologies increases employees' negative extra-role behaviors, specifically counterproductive work behavior and negative word-of-mouth. Furthermore, emotional exhaustion partially mediated the relationship between after-hours work communication and negative extra-role behaviors.

The study provides practical implications for an organization's effective optimization of work-related communication to overcome adverse consequences for employees and organizations. Corporate leaders and communication professionals are encouraged to establish clear guidelines related to the use of communication technologies after hours and exercise leadership practices to prevent after-hours communication through communication technologies from contributing to employees' burnout.

The findings enhance the understanding of the role of after-hours work communication through communication technologies in the workplace by revealing how the effects of after-hours work communication enabled by communication technologies on employees' psychological well-being spills over to organizational effectiveness.

This study aims to examine the effects of diversity-oriented leadership and strategic internal communication on employees’ knowledge-sharing behavior during a crisis situation, coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in particular. Integrating knowledge sharing research with internal crisis communication literature as well as self-determination theory, the mediating roles of employees’ intrinsic needs satisfaction are also identified.

An online survey was conducted with 490 full-time employees in the USA across industry sectors during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Results suggest that diversity-oriented leadership contributes to transparent internal communication during a crisis and increases employees’ satisfaction of autonomy, competence and relatedness needs. Transparent internal communication also increases employees’ intrinsic needs satisfaction, which in turn fosters their job engagement and knowledge-sharing behavior during the crisis.

This study is one of the earliest studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of diversity-oriented leadership and strategic internal crisis communication in enhancing employees’ knowledge-sharing behavior, especially in the context of COVID-19.

Organisations engage in explicit and intentional communication with employees in various ways. However, communication will not be received in a “neutral” context. Employees operate in an organisational (or behavioural) context determined by the organisational culture, structures and systems, and the management practices. This context acts as a source of implicit communication towards employees. This view fits the various perspectives about communication, which does not need to be considered as a two‐way process, and which can be intentionally or unintentionally, transmitted and received. All too often, implicit communication is at odds with the “official” explicit communication. Through this latter form of communication the organisation might, for example, proclaim a quality image, while in reality employees experience that, in case of conflicts, delivery planning prevails over quality. Likewise, communication about the “learning organisation” appears to be cumbersome in a culture suppressing discussion about failures. The effect of implicit communication should not be underestimated. Cynicism among employees is repeatedly the result of inconsistent messages being received. This paper describes the aspects of organisational culture, structures and systems, and management practices, seen in a behavioural context, in order to illustrate how these aspects act as an implicit source of communication to employees. Additionally, this form of communication expresses whether employees themselves are seen as the crucial core of organisational success. The importance of consistent signals is illustrated, specifically with respect to organisational change programs.

With the growing concern for environmental and sustainability issues, especially in the aftermath of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, organizations feel compelled to pursue green sustainability in their operations. In this regard, the active involvement of employees in pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs) is crucial for achieving organizational environmental sustainability goals (Saeed et al., 2019). To shed light on this important issue, this study aims to investigate the impact of interacting/engaging environmental corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication strategy on employees' PEBs through the mediating effects of communal relationship and employee empowerment.

A total of 443 full-time USA employees working across various industries participated in an online survey.

The interacting/engaging environmental CSR communication strategy fosters employees' perceived communal relationship with their organizations and empowers them to support their organization's environmental initiatives, which, in turn, positively influences employees' PEBs at work.

This study advances CSR and internal communication literature through the lens of relationship management and self-determination theories. The findings theoretically suggest the effectiveness of the interacting/engaging environmental CSR communication strategy in nurturing favorable employee–organization relationships (EORs), employee empowerment and PEBs at work. The practical implications of CSR communication are also elaborated.

This study is designed to bridge a gap in the existing leadership communication literature by delving into lesser-explored facets of the field. It particularly concentrates on investigating how the verbal aggressiveness of supervisors influences various aspects of the workplace, including workplace emotional culture, the quality of employee–organization relationships (EORs) and the prevalence of counterproductive work behaviors (CWB).

This study employed a quantitative research design to investigate the impact of supervisors' verbal aggressiveness on employee and organizational outcomes. The data were collected from 392 full-time employees across various organizations and industries in the USA using a self-report questionnaire. The researchers used structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze the data and test hypotheses.

The findings of this study showed that supervisors' verbal aggressiveness had a significant positive association with negative emotional culture and employee CWB. However, it had no direct impact on employee–organization relationships. The effect of supervisor verbal aggressiveness on employee CWB was found to be mediated by a negative team-level emotional culture.

This study advances the literature on leadership communication by highlighting the detrimental influence of the dark side of leadership communication. More specifically, by identifying negative emotional culture and employee CWB as the direct outcomes of supervisor verbal aggressiveness, the authors add to the existing theoretical knowledge on verbal aggressiveness in the workplace. Additionally, this study provides empirical evidence of the impact of a negative emotional culture on eliciting employees' CWBs and diminishing relationship quality, adding to the body of knowledge on why managing emotional culture is crucial for organizations and workgroups.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how a company’s symmetrical internal communication efforts could influence its employees’ perception of relationship outcomes with the company and the subsequent employee communication behaviors about the company to others and their turnover intention. Additionally, the mediation effects of employee-organization relationship (EOR) quality between symmetrical internal communication and employee engagement were tested.

The study collected the data from a survey of randomly selected 438 individuals who work as sales representatives of the case organization. Respondents were randomly selected through stratified sampling. For the overall statistical procedure, this study adopted the two-step structural equation modeling: on the basis of the final measurement model analysis from confirmatory factor analysis, the proposed structural model was tested using latent variables.

The findings of this research clearly demonstrate: employee/internal communication management is linked with employee engagement; employee engagement enhances supportive employee communication behaviors and reduces turnover intention. Also, the mediation results show strong mediation of EORs on the effects of symmetrical internal communication on employee engagement.

Employees’ communication behaviors such as megaphoning and scouting have special strategic values to organizations. With information seeking, selecting, forwarding, and sharing behaviors of employees, organizations may obtain more valuable information than through formal procedures and channels. Professional literature has long been supporting the importance of fostering positive employee communication behaviors (ECBs), suggesting that WOM and information from the employees deemed as most trustworthy by the external publics. ECBs about their organizations may be viewed as a testament of the quality of EOR. This study results show that employee engagement plays a key role in creating positive ECBs.

Pragmatically, as noted in the findings, symmetrical communication is an important factor that leads to positive ECB. To facilitate employees’ favorable communication regarding an organization, therefore, the organization needs to practice a two-way, employee-centered symmetrical communication system in its everyday communication management. Communication managers are advised to nurture internal communication practices that listen to the employees and invite their participation in addition to providing complete and fair information to employees. Second, by showing the significant positive influence of EOR on employee engagement and ECB, the finding of the study suggests that strategic relationship management with internal publics affect overall management effectiveness. Hence, organizational managers need to adopt various relationship cultivation strategies in their communication with employees, which have been previously proposed by several studies.

The findings of the study demonstrated that the effects of employee relationship management and symmetrical internal communication indeed exist beyond ECBs to the actual managerial outcomes. The findings also suggest a three-stage model of employee communication management: employee/internal communication management antecedents; employee engagement; and supportive outcomes of effective employee communication programs, such as supportive/extra ECBs.

This study aims to examine the effects of transformational leadership on employees' internal (i.e. voice) and external (i.e. megaphoning) communication behaviors and to explore the mediating role of employees' communal and exchange relationship norms with their organization.

An online survey was conducted with full-time employees working in various industry sectors in the USA.

Transformational leadership significantly increased employees' voice behaviors and their positive and negative megaphoning behaviors. Communal relationship norms exerted a significant mediation effect on employees' communicative behaviors and exchange relationship norms had positive impacts on employees' megaphoning behaviors.

This study is among the first attempts to test the effect of transformational leadership style on employees' communicative actions within and outside of a company and the mediating role of exchange-communal relationship norms.