Leadership and digital communication in Australian SMEs amid COVID-19

Managing in Writing: Recommendations from Textual Patterns in Managers’ Email Communication

“…The latest strand of studies traces the processes related to reconfiguring managerial communication given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that normalized remote work with less direct control over employees and with a growing prevalence of computer-mediated communication channels ( Kirchner et al, 2021 ; Thapa et al, 2022 ). (Written) communication is shown as an even more essential competence for managers at the time of pandemic, as they become chief informational officers in many organizations ( Dirani et al, 2020 ).…”

“…One strand of this research focuses on personal qualities and trust in managerial communication (Bakker-Pieper & de Vries, 2013; de Vries, Bakker-Pieper, & Oostenveld, 2010; Yang et al, 2020). Another strand of scholarship identifies effective communication patterns in various sectors and recommends best practices with respect to, for example, motivating workers, preventing conflict or limiting free-riding (de Vries, Bakker-Pieper, Konings, & Schouten, 2013; Boulu-Reshef et al, 2020; Thapa et al, 2022). This study considers this literature, but refocuses from studying managers’ personalities to studying managers’ communications, particularly emails.…”

“…Corpus linguistics offers specific algorithms and tools to obtain information about language patterns based on frequency of occurrences and co-occurrences of individual words (segments) and their quantification. This allows researchers to offer an accurate description, which, in turn, leads to a deeper understanding of the relationship between recurrent linguistic forms and their communicative goals and serves as a departure point for further in-depth qualitative analyses and interpretations (Sinclair & Carter, 2004).…”