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For every organisation there are at least several publics, the support of which is critical to organisational success. Many scholars and practitioners have argued for the primacy of the employee public, because of the effect of employee attitudes and behaviours on the experience of customers, and the productivity and innovation of the enterprise. Organisations that accept this premise often respond with traditional employee communication programmes and techniques. This paper accepts the primacy of employees in the hierarchy of publics, but argues especially for the role of the frontline supervisor as the key to effective communication with an engagement of the employee population. The paper is in part a macro review of literature on the employee public going back 50 years. It comments on the new social contract between organisations and their employees. It documents business results that are associated with an involved employee public. It asserts that employee loyalty lies primarily not to the organisation itself but with the work unity – especially the immediate supervisor. The authors also examine behaviour that increases or reduces employee trust, and describe the necessary skills and support systems that organisations must provide for their supervisors in order to make them superb communicators.

Public safety (communicators; e.g. 9-1-1, police, fire and ambulance call-takers and dispatchers), like many other public safety personnel (e.g. police, paramedics), (re)suffer operational stress injuries (OSIs) that are too often hidden and at a prevalence higher than the general population. Unfortunately, there are very little data for OSI rates in Canadian communicators. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the only pan-Canadian study focusing on organizational culture, and its potential influence on OSIs, within the communicator context.

The authors conducted a 179-item online survey of Canadian communicators comprising 17 validated screenings for occupational stress injuries and symptoms and four open-ended questions relating to their agency's organizational culture. The authors thematically analysed participants' open-ended responses and their screening scores.

A semi-grounded thematic approach revealed that managers and supervisors were significant contributors to negative perceptions (n = 165) of organizational culture, potentially resulting in or worsening existing OSIs. Specifically, leadership was viewed as ineffective, inconsistent, unsupportive, abusive and toxic, with limited understanding of communicator roles. Communicators described feeling devalued, particularly when leaders fail to recognize communicator OSIs, which can perpetuate stigma. Conversely, positive leaders (n = 24) were described as supportive, communicative and encouraging.

The findings suggest that while leadership behaviours are a key factor in employee well-being, it varies considerably across agencies, impacting treatment-seeking behaviours. The authors’ new understandings of leaders' roles in OSIs may help reduce the frequency and severity of communicator OSIs, helping ensure that emergency services are delivered to Canadians.

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.

Current events such as the #metoo and #timesup movements have ushered in an era of heightened awareness of sexist organizational climate. Increasingly, supporters have called for top-down changes, demanding that organizations embrace a culture of accountability. Accordingly, the current study proposed and investigated the concept of benevolently sexist organizational climate and explored the impact on women's state self-esteem, while testing for the potential moderating effects of power and gender.

The current experimental study utilized a video video-based manipulation to introduce benevolently sexist organizational climate with a 2 (content of communication) x 2 (gender of communicator) x 2 (status of communicator) between-subjects design. The hypotheses were tested using an analysis of variance moderation model, based on a sample of 652 women.

Results indicated a significant two-way interaction between benevolently sexist organizational climate and power on self-esteem. Specifically, results suggested that benevolently sexist organizational climates have a greater negative impact on women's self-esteem when a supervisor communicates the information on the climate as opposed to a coworker.

Benevolently sexist climate had a deleterious impact on women's organizational outcomes especially when communicated by a supervisor. These findings can be used for guidance on the development of training and interventions targeted at mitigating the prevalence of benevolently sexist workplace climate.

This study was the first to propose the concept of a benevolently sexist organizational climate. Additionally, the study demonstrated the negative impact of a benevolently sexist organizational climate on women's state self-esteem providing important implications for organizations. Further theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The purpose of this study is to refine and expand an emerging US government communication model, the government communication decision wheel, by testing the differences between the communication practices of US public sector communicators working for non‐elected officials versus those employed by elected officials.

Drawing from surveys of 781 US government communicators, the study compares the communication practices and influences of government communicators working for elected officials versus non‐elected officials.

The study identifies four significant differences and five similarities in how the public sector environment affects non‐elected and elected officials’ communicators’ public relations practices.

While the study and underlying model focus on US government communication, this study provides valuable theoretical insights. It supports the model's underlying premise that the public sector is unique from the private sector while also further refining the significant differences within the US government sector.

This study helps US government communicators identify unique environmental attributes that affect communication activities in the public sector. It helps identify how these attributes affect communication practices within individual and collaborative contexts. Finally, it helps non‐governmental communicators and communicators outside of the US to understand how the attributes may affect communication practices when they collaborate with government communicators from the four levels of US government as well as with those who work for elected and non‐elected officials.

Despite the critical importance of communication in the public sector, very little research focuses specifically on government communication outside of political communication. The findings provide valuable insights for practitioners and contribute to public relations theory development for the under‐researched public sector.

Our research analyzes how organization dynamics develop in order to initialize telebanks, which can facilitate (or hinder) the enactment of enabling (or coercive) structures. The data revealed that sometimes actors accept the constraints of social roles and technology and, at other times, they exercise agency to circumvent those constraints. The differences in organizational development are explained with the concept of bricolage and the structural characteristics that facilitate its occurrence. A culture supportive of learning and perceptions of psychological safety were found to be preconditions for enabling organizing, in that they increase the deployment of previously acquired knowledge, resources, and routines; facilitate the enactment of design and planning; and nurture improvisation and bricolage, thus increasing familiarity with resources and the willingness of people to actively participate in the organization’s design.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the leadership skills and competencies defined in the Pathways to the Profession and understand the value senior corporate communications managers place on those skills and competencies and how senior-level corporate communicators demonstration of those skills and competencies.

Institutional review board approval was obtained for a qualitative research design based on focus groups conducted in four Canadian cities with 25 senior corporate communicators, human resources professionals, and general business managers.

This research has validated the competencies and credentials for senior-level corporate communications and public relations executives as highlighted in the Pathways to the Profession framework. It has also provided the profession with an understanding of the value senior public relations and organizational managers place on professional association membership and professional and academic credentials. This research is an important contribution to the growing body of knowledge on competency frameworks as professional associations, such as the Canadian Public Relations Society, take leadership positions in providing educational institutions with sets of standards for public relations and corporate communications education in Canada.

This research will help the public relations and corporate communications profession provide guidance to educational institutions programming for senior-level public relations and communications management education based on quantifiable data on the value executives place on a particular set of skills and competencies.

This is the first study of its kind that examines the perceived competencies and skills of Canadian senior public relations/communications management leadership. Further this research sought to assess the value of academic and professional credentials necessary for participation in executive leadership roles.

Recently, ethical leadership has become a widely studied research topic. Simultaneously, many studies have begun to emphasise the role of interpersonal communication competence (ICC) in successful leadership. However, there has been little discussion on the links between ethical leadership and leaders’ ICC. To address this research gap, this study aims to compare and combine the research traditions of ethical leadership and leaders’ ICC. The study is based on two literature reviews examining (a) ethical leadership (substudy 1; N = 27) and (b) leaders’ ICC (substudy 2; N = 18). The research questions are as follows: (a) How are the requirements of leaders’ ICC noticed in the literature of ethical leadership? (substudy 1) (b) How are the requirements of ethical leadership noticed in the literature of leaders’ ICC? (substudy 2) The findings reveal that (a) studies in ethical leadership rarely pay attention to leaders’ ICC and (b) studies in leaders’ ICC do not often discuss ethical aspects of ICC, at least explicitly. While a larger sample would have been preferred, the study contributes to previous research by addressing a research gap between ethical leadership and leaders’ ICC and suggests integrating these research traditions to better understand the nature of ethics and ICC in leadership. By promoting novel interdisciplinary research perspectives, the study provides a foundation for further research and development of (a) a competence-based approach to ethical leadership and (b) an ethics-focused approach to competent leadership communication.