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Based on Lasswell’s communication model, this study investigates how four categories of factors (i.e. the source, content, medium and receiver) conjointly affect the relational, financial and social outcomes (i.e. what effect) of CSA communication.

With a survey (N = 366), this study found configurations of core CSA communication factors leading to three different CSA communication outcomes.

While this study found multiways to yield three different CSA outcomes, combinational logic indicated the combined effects from source, content, medium and receiver. With content and medium, individuals’ connectedness (receiver) to a CSA issue is a core factor leading to a high level of purchase intention and issue advocacy. This study also found that message strategies (i.e. informativeness, factual tone, no promotional tone) are core factors leading to a high level of trust and issue advocacy.

With the theoretical guidance, this research contributes to strategic communication practice for various entities involved in advocacy communication by enabling an improved understanding of advocacy communication factors and triggering different communication outcomes.

As CSA communication involves multiple strategies, conventional research agenda focusing on correlational and path analysis approaches provide limited understanding of communication practice. To fill this void, this study adopts a configurational approach to understand current CSA communication practices holistically.

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 paper’s objective is to provide a systematic literature review of the contextual factors affecting downward communication from supervisors to subordinates in the audit environment. In addition, this review identifies emerging research themes and directions for future research.

I accomplish this review’s objectives by leveraging communication literature to establish a framework to identify and synthesize contextual factors affecting downward communication in the audit environment. The review identifies 50 published articles in the last 20 years from leading accounting and auditing journals.

This study consolidates research findings on downward communication under two primary contextual factors: (1) message and (2) channel. Findings indicate that empirical research examining communication in audit is fragmented and limited. Studies examining the message focus heavily on its content and treatment in the areas of feedback, nonverbal cues, and fraud brainstorming, and a handful of additional studies examine the effectiveness of the channel in these areas. Additional research is needed to understand a broader set of supervisor–subordinate communication practices, including those that are computer-mediated, and their effect on subordinate auditors’ judgments and behaviors in the contemporary audit environment.

Much of the audit literature examining communication to date is topic-versus construct-based, making it difficult to see how the research findings relate to one another. This review is the first to synthesize the literature to provide academics recommendations for a way forward, and inform practitioners of communication practices whereby supervisors can be trained to improve audit quality.

This study, informed by the Situational Crisis Communication Theory, aims to suggest two primary response strategies that can be used for effective internal crisis communication during a pandemic situation, such as COVID-19. The effect of base response strategies on employees' perceptions of communication quality, leadership and relational outcomes were investigated.

An online survey of full-time employees in the United States was conducted.

The findings showed that for an instructing information strategy, not all types of information were equally associated with positive employee responses in terms of perceived quality of internal communication related to the COVID-19 pandemic and transformational leadership. Specific information that employees need to know in order to safely perform daily tasks, such as organizational protocols and thorough preparation, seem to be the most needed and desired information. Adjusting information was positively associated with employee perceptions of internal communication quality and perceptions of CEO leadership. Employees' perceived quality of internal communication affected by the base crisis response strategies were positively correlated with perceptions of transformational leadership and relational outcomes (i.e. employee trust in the organization, employee perceptions of the organization's commitment to relationships with employees, employee support for organizational decision-making related to COVID-19).

This study presents important theoretical and practical insights through an interdisciplinary approach that applies the theoretical framework and relationship-oriented outcomes of public relations to public health crisis situations.

Building on evolutionary emancipation theory, the purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of workplace fun on employees’ scouting behavior through the serial mediation of employees’ psychological empowerment and megaphoning.

A questionnaire survey technique is used to elicit the responses of 445 employees from service organizations.

The statistical results revealed that fun at work influences employees scouting behavior through the serial mediation of psychological empowerment and megaphoning. The direction relationship between fun and scouting was not statistically significant, thus a full mediation mechanism was proved.

The value of employees’ communication behavior has increased in the recent past, and it overweighs the conventional mediums (e.g. TV, radio and newspaper). But the antecedents and mechanisms through which communication behavior can be influenced are an area that has not gained researchers’ attention. This study proposes such a conceptual model and empirically tests it.

This paper describes the development of a digital role play game (RPG) designed to help construction apprentices to better communicate with their supervisors about issues with the potential to impact on their physical and psychological health and safety.

A participatory approach was adopted to utilise the knowledge and insights of the target users to inform the digital RPG development. Apprentices and supervisors were interviewed to identify characteristics of effective supervisor-apprentice communication, which became the RPG’s learning objectives. The scenarios constructed in the RPG were drawn from lived experiences shared by the apprentices in the interviews. During the development process, consultations were conducted with an advisory committee comprising of apprentices and supervisors to improve the realism of the RPG scenarios.

Three scenarios were developed for the RPG. In each scenario, players are asked to make decisions at various interaction points about how the characters should respond to the unfolding and challenging situations. Scripts were developed for the game, which were acted out and motion captured to animate digital MetaHuman characters embedded in a virtual construction site. Two example situations are introduced in this paper to illustrate the development process.

To our knowledge, the RPG introduced is one of the first applications of digital game-based training in the construction industry. The adoption of a participatory design approach ensures that the game content relates to real-world experiences. The digital RPG is highly interactive and engaging in nature and presents a novel approach to developing “soft” skills in construction.

This study aimed to identify and describe how mentoring influences the mentor, by operationalising and specifying learning outcomes involved in mentoring.

This study used an action research approach, by uniting theory and practice to explore new ways of learning and evolve the field of practice in education. Thematic analysis was used to identify and organise patterns or themes that emerged from the data.

The results showed that mentoring changed the mentors' perspectives towards improved understanding, more flexibility and approval of other cultures. It seems that mentoring expanded the mentors' search for values, wishes and resources, including an awareness that our values, wishes and needs are more similar than different. Mentoring also seems to have improved the ability to reformulate, be flexible, strive to optimise user engagement and engage with people as they are, based on their own prerequisites.

The low number of participants means the results cannot be generalised, and voluntary participation may have led to more motivated involvement and positive results.

This study shows that mentoring has had an impact on students' development of intercultural competence and cultural sensitivity through regular meetings with individuals from a different cultural background. Mentoring seems to have revealed insights into underlying prejudices and changed perspectives towards better understanding, thus increased acceptance of other cultures.

Search for similar studies shows a lack of research that operationalises and specifies the learning outcomes that mentors gain from being a mentor.

This paper sought to understand the communication activities of employees who were required to work from home because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors examined the relationship between these individuals' efficient and interrupting communication with their peers in other locations and with individuals who were colocated with them at home. The authors also investigated these workers' job engagement and willingness to speak out about organizational issues.

This paper drew upon a survey of 579 employees via an online panel.

Efficient communication positively predicted employees' job engagement, whereas interruptions negatively predicted job engagement. Additional analyses showed that efficient communication was positively associated with job engagement, which in predicted a higher level of employee voice. Managers showed significantly higher levels of job engagement and voice than nonmanagers.

Recommendations are made for communication managers to cultivate job engagement and to manage interruptions with home-based employees.

Scholars with an interest in job demands and resources have not fully examined how interpersonal communication shapes job engagement and voice scholars have often overlooked teleworkers' communication needs. This study adds depth to the communication management literature in both areas.

This paper bridges the gap between the theory and practice by developing a life cycle sustainability tracker (LCST). The study is seeking to proffer solutions to an observed shortcoming of conventional life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) communication platforms. Notably, the static nature of the information provided on such platforms has made it difficult for them to be used for real-time decision-making and predictions. The main aim of this paper is to develop a LCST that facilitates a dynamic visualisation of life cycle sustainability results and allows for an integrated benchmark across the dimensions of sustainability.

The study leverages the model development capabilities of the design science research strategy in accomplishing a dynamic and novel communication platform. A life cycle thinking methodology and appropriate multicriteria decision approach (MCDA) is applied to accomplish a comprehensive, streamlined and replicable approach in mapping and tracking the progress of sustainable development goals (SDGs) in the National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP) projects in India.

It was found that: (1) The use of the LCST tracker provides a dynamic and holistic insight into the key LCSA indicators with clearly defined benchmarks to assess the impact on the SDG 11, (2) The NIP projects achieve an upward trend across all the regions, and the percentage of opportunities ranges from 11 to 24%, with the South experiencing the highest growth and the North having the minimal increase in percentage and (3) The assessment score (52–58%) provides performance metrics that align well with the LCST – which ranges between “Fair” and “Average” for all the regions in India.

The novelty of this research is that the LCST provides a transparent and harmonised approach to reporting on the LCSA results. The LCST utilises heat maps and radial mapping to achieve an intuitive display of large amounts of highly heterogeneous data, thus allowing the synthesis of large sets of information compactly and with coherence. Progress towards the SDGs change on a yearly basis; hence, a dynamic LCSA tool provides a timely and the valuable context to map and track performance across different regions and contexts.

This study aims to explore the phenomenon of Islamic religious communication and how Islamic banks in Pakistan use religion-based communication, along with its expected outcomes.

Transcendental phenomenology approach is opted using a multi-stage data collection strategy consisting of observations, documentary reviews and semi-structural interviews to get deep into the phenomenon in a particular context.

Findings highlight Islamic religious communication as workplace Islamic da’wah that is majorly categorized into compulsive da’wah, objectics da’wah and impulsive da’wah, serving its role in bringing spirituality to work through work-faith integration.

The finding of the study can be used in planning, formulating and implementing Islamic da’wah-based model to induce spirituality at work.

This study is the first of its type exploring Islamic da’wah in an organizational context as a mean to bring spirituality at work.