Communication in organizations.

Throughout the course of a day, individuals experience a number of different situations that affect how they think, feel, and behave. However, until recently, there was little research aimed at describing what factors may be related to the psychological properties of situations in individuals' everyday lives. Recent theoretical (e.g., the Situational Eight DIAMONDS) and methodological (e.g., experience sampling, Day Reconstruction Method) advances make the present research tractable. Based on the extant literature, three studies, employing different methodologies, were designed to explore whether three specific factors are related to the experience of situations: time of day, gender, and employment status. Study 1 employs data from 835 participants recruited on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (AMT). Participants reported a recent situation (single time-point method) and completed a 290-item measure of situations, the Comprehensive Situations Item Pool (CSIP). The results demonstrated consistent daily patterns in the experience of situations. For example, the situational characteristic Duty tends to increase throughout the day, peak at noon, decreasing thereafter. Study 2 uses an experience sampling method to further investigate the daily and weekly temporal patterns in the situational characteristics from a within-person perspective. University participants (N = 210) were contacted via smartphone and rated their situation up to 8 times per day for 7 days. The results showed that there are some similarities and differences in the temporal pattern of situations at the within-person level. Duty, for instance, exhibits a different pattern depending on the day of the week (e.g., negative and linear on weekends, but quadratic on weekdays). Overall, Study 2 demonstrates that there are clear within- and between-day patterns in situation characteristics. Lastly, Study 3 employs a full-day method using archival data from the 2013 American Time Use Survey (ATUS). Participants drawn from a representative sample of Americans (N = 11,384) reported all of their situations for a recent day using the Day Reconstruction Method. The results found that, in addition to consistent daily and weekly trends, patterns for situation characteristics are related to individual differences such as gender and employment status.

To be successful, organizations that undertake a large-scale planned change initiative must maintain employee commitment and loyalty to the organization. Identification with the organization can support that objective and is crucial in changing organizations when managers often introduce different cultural assumptions, values, and norms than those held by the organization's members. Employee identification with the organization is also pivotal in the employee's decision making process. This study analyses a representative sample of an organization's newsletter published during a reengineering project. Identification strategies of common ground, the assumed we, antithesis and unifying symbols are used as the foundation for analysis. Results show that identification strategies are consistently used in this genre of organizational communication to maintain employee commitment during a change initiative. In addition, three additional tactics of the common ground strategy were uncovered: enlistment, self-congratulation and knowledge-sharing. The implications of these results are discussed.