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When a crisis occurs, do corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities protect organizational reputation by buffering negative effects or do CSR activities intensify negative effects, potentially leading to a worse reputation compared to if the organization had no prior CSR engagement? The authors hypothesize that if a crisis emerges in a domain aligned with an organization’s CSR initiatives (crisis-congruent CSR) backfire effects would arise, adversely affecting the organization’s reputation. Conversely, in cases of incongruence, where the crisis emerges in a domain not aligned with an organization’s previous CSR involvement, a buffering effect would manifest, protecting the organization’s reputation.

The authors conducted an experiment with a 3 (crisis-congruent, crisis-incongruent, and no CSR activities) × 2 (repeated measures) mixed factorial design. In the first scenario, no information was provided concerning a company’s social commitment. Alternatively, participants were exposed to an article illustrating the company’s dedication either to healthcare (crisis-incongruent commitment) or to combating sexism (crisis-congruent commitment). Afterward, participants were presented with a newspaper article addressing allegations of sexism against the company’s CEO.

The findings demonstrate that prior CSR activities have the potential both to serve as a buffer and to cause backfire effects in times of crisis. Domain congruence is the decisive moderator of these effects: Crisis-incongruent CSR activities acted as a buffer, crisis-congruent CSR activities “backfired” and led to more negative perceptions of the company’s reputation.

The study directly contributes to the understanding of CSR effects in crisis communication, while also addressing the often paradoxical and contradictory findings of prior studies.

Editors of employee magazines may be torn between diverging expectations among their stakeholders. The management might be interested in strategically supportive communication, whereas employees might expect objective, independent, or critical coverage. Based on quantitative data, the paper aims to analyze how the editors perceive these expectations, how they see their professional role in this field of tension and how critically the magazines report.

The authors conducted a quantitative survey of 197 editors of employee magazines and a quantitative content analysis of 200 articles of employee magazines.

Editors perceive differences regarding the expectations of management and employees. These discrepancies, in turn, contribute to the experience of role conflicts. Our analysis reveals three types of editors: the voice of the management, the critical observer and the consensus-oriented mediator.

The study addresses the scarcely investigated area of conflict in which editors of employee magazines work. It is one of the first studies to analyze editors' perceived expectations of stakeholders, their professional self-perception and potential role conflicts with a quantitative survey. For the first time, quantitative methods are used to examine the causes of editors' role conflicts.

This study aims to analyze the structures, forms and functions of informal communication in telecommuting settings. Previous research on telecommuting has not considered the influence of telecommuting settings on informal communication, and research on informal communication has mainly focused on face-to-face communication while working in a physical office. This article aims to bring these two research strands together by analyzing the informal communication behavior of employees working from home.

The authors conducted qualitative interviews with 21 employees who were working from home. The participants were recruited using quota sampling and the data were analyzed following the procedure for examining qualitative data proposed by Mayring (2014).

The findings reveal similarities as well as differences between those working in an office and those working from home in terms of informal communication with co-workers: Informal communication fulfills similar functions in both cases, but remote work leads to less informal communication and hinders incidental exposure to other employees. Informal talks need to be planned in advance or strategically initiated. The authors identified five informal communication scenarios in telecommuting settings that partly, but not fully, overlap with scenarios in regular office settings.

The present study is one of the first to examine informal communication in telecommuting settings. Previous studies have either excluded the aspect of informal communication or the situation for employees working in telecommuting settings. The results provide new insights into informal communication behavior in remote work.

Past research has been concerned with finding reasons for failure of organizational changes and the role of employees in it. Whether employees hinder or support organizational change depends not only on the organizational context, but also on individual predispositions and the change communication employees experience during the process. The purpose of this paper is to test how these three categories affect employees’ attitudes toward the change as well as their tendency to show resistance or to support it.

An online survey (n=608) of German employees who were recently subject to a change in their workplace was conducted.

With respect to individual predispositions and organizational context, the results show that in particular skepticism, openness, engagement and influence on decisions are relevant predictors. Change communication variables (e.g. involvement, participation and appreciation) explain the largest share of variance, indicating that transparent communication and including employees in the process result in positive attitudes toward change and support.

This study adds to the discussion about which factors determine the support or resistance to organizational change by identifying relevant predictors, organizing them along three categories and testing them concurrently.

Editors of employee magazines work in a grey area between public relations and journalism. On the one hand, they need to accommodate the company management’s interest in a positive presentation; on the other, they must meet the employees’ need for objective and independent information. Although employee magazines reach millions of recipients every day, its editors have rarely been the focus of academic work. The purpose of this paper is to change this and scrutinise the way the editors view their professional role and the role conflicts to which they are subjected.

We conduct 15 qualitative semi-structured interviews with editors of employee magazines to analyse their professional role and possible conflicts in their work.

The editors’ self-concept varies significantly along two dimensions, which the authors use as the basis for distinguishing four types: the management ambassador, the employee representative, the mediator and the service provider.

The study sheds light on employee magazines, a medium between public relations and journalism that has not been analysed before. It helps to specify the role of these magazines and its editors’ between the expectations of the management and the employees.

Previous research assumes that informal communication may be highly relevant for organizations, but little is known about its actual relevance for employees or its functions and effects. The article aims to examine functions, types and effects of informal communication in organizations.

Research on internal communication usually focuses on formal strategic communication with or among employees. Informal communication between employees in organizations has received far less attention, although a great deal of communication in organizations is informal. Therefore, the present study analyses informal communication in organizations. The authors conducted a quantitative online survey of employees working for different organizations in Germany.

The authors show that five types of employee can be differentiated regarding their informal communication behavior: the chatterer, the focuser, the strategist, the small-talker and the networker. Moreover, the study demonstrates that informal communication significantly increases employees' perceptions of being informed, as well as their affective commitment, both of which increase job satisfaction. Finally, results show that informal communication does not decrease employees' productivity, but instead helps them to carry out their jobs more effectively.

Although previous studies indicate that a large part of the communication among employees within an organization is informal, research has rarely dealt with this phenomenon, instead focusing especially on formal communication. This is one of the first papers that focuses on informal communication among employees using quantitative survey data.

Describes how KHS Maschinen‐und Anlagenbau is transforming its service operation to strengthen customer relationships and accelerate growth.

To underestimate service quality is like saying goodbye to some of your hard‐earned profits. Even after revamping and upgrading products, many organizations continue to experience decline because they forget that people want to feel good. The feel‐good factor is espoused by politicians throughout the world to nurture votes. The fact that people want to feel good is often overlooked and ignores Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. How many times have you bought a product only to find there is a fault and the product needs replacing? This is normally something which is very irritating, but not ulcer‐inducing enough to get worked up about until, that is, the customer service department treats you as though it is your fault.

Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains (2017) is an attempt to provide a narrative arc for the rise of free market ideas in political action during the second half of the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first century. The central character in her narrative is neither F.A. Hayek nor Milton Friedman, let alone Adam Smith or Ludwig von Mises, but James M. Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel Prize winner in economics. MacLean argues that rather than extol the virtues of the market economy as Hayek and Friedman did before him, Buchanan focused on the dysfunctions of politics. Due to a series of argumentative fallacies and failures that follow from her ideological blinders, I argue that MacLean’s attempt is a missed opportunity to seriously engage some very pressing issues in public choice and political economy and understand how James Buchanan attempted to resolve them in a democratic manner. As such, Democracy in Chains is not only a mischaracterization of Buchanan and his project but also a poignant lesson to us all about how ideological blinders can subvert even the sincerest effort to unearth truth in the social sciences and the humanities.