Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Reconciling Self-Censorship: A Qualitative Study Of The Experiences Of University Staff And Administrators, Leigh C. Morales

Doctoral Dissertations

In addition to a global pandemic, the past three years have been marked by racial, social, and political unrest. These circumstances add meaningful context to examine and better understand factors that undermine free expression and contribute to self-censorship among university staff and administrators. To date, few studies have holistically explored the unique experiences of university staff and administrators with self-censorship and how this phenomenon affects their experience on college and university campuses. Understanding why staff and administrators choose to self-censor may allow for a deeper discussion about speech climate and the degree to which colleges and universities implement and uphold …

"It's Like Walking On Eggshells": The Lived Experiences Of Workplace Bullying Bystanders In Academia, Jenilee Williams

Doctoral Dissertations

Over 60 million working adults in the U.S. report bullying experiences (Namie, 2017). However, many organizations fail to actively intervene. Workplace bullying becomes a detrimental process riddled with emotional trauma, confusion, and depleted organizational productivity. Workplace bullying bystanders are pivotal as they impact the trajectory of these issues. Bystanders can either be a target-ally (e.g., offer support or actively intervene), bully-ally (e.g., act as a henchman), or silent-bystander (e.g., ignore the situation). Bystanders contend with their own complex sensemaking processes when witnessing bullying happen to others. Researchers have often examined this role through a post-positivistic lens in the quest to …

Exploring Workplace Connections Of Employees With Multiple Role Expectations: Accommodating Communication Behaviors Of Hospital Chaplains, Stephen Spates

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore the communication behaviors of hospital chaplains in an effort to understand their workplace role. In the literature, most chaplain recognition related to spiritual interactions and improved health outcomes for patients, which left much information about their workplace lives unknown. This study used interviews with hospital chaplains to explore their communication behaviors. Using communication allowed chaplains to manage roles and uncertainty, build relationships, and handle the paradoxical interactions they encounter at work. The findings revealed that hospital chaplains, who operate as liaisons in their organizations, practiced convergence to accommodate others. They also managed …

The Net Generation At Work: Younger Employees’ Understanding Of Productive/ Counter-Productive Information Across Communication Channels, Whitney Lauren Tipton

Doctoral Dissertations

Organizations are increasingly implored to engage in communicative accommodation based on employees’ generational cohort. While previous research has found generational differences in workplace values, empirical evidence has not supported the popular claim that younger generations prefer more technological communication than their older colleagues. Using media richness theory (MRT), social presence theory (SPT), and channel expansion theory (CET) as a framework, this dissertation analyzes the responses of 382 Net Generation-aged (18-27 years old) participants to questions related to communication channel preference, information type, channel familiarity, and productivity/counter-productivity at work. Significant differences were found between communication channels across five types of common …

“Race Talk” In Organizational Discourse: A Comparative Study Of Two Texas Chambers Of Commerce, Natasha Shrikant

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation takes an interpretive, discursive approach to understanding how organizational members create meanings about race, and other identities, through their everyday communication practices in the workplace. This dissertation also explores how these everyday discourses about race might reproduce, negotiate, or challenge ideologies that maintain the dominant position of Whiteness in United States racial hierarchies. I draw from data collected during eight months of ethnographic fieldwork (from Jan-Aug 2014) with two chambers of commerce in a large Texas city: an Asian American Chamber of Commerce (AACC) and what I call the “North City” Chamber of Commerce (NCC). The AACC explicitly …

Proactive Communication: An Investigation Of Employee Reactions To Organizational Communication Problems, Katie Marie Reno

Doctoral Dissertations

This study explored how employees proactively responded to perceived communication problems and what employees considered when proactively responding. The study utilized semi-structured interviews to gather data, resulting in 15 interviews. The interviews were transcribed yielding 130 single-spaced pages of data. Template analysis was used to code the data for themes. This analysis was chosen because it allowed the researcher to utilize previously established literature to develop a codebook, which could then be modified on the data.

The findings demonstrate that employees will enact many types of proactive behavior to correct perceived communication problems in an organization. Findings also demonstrated that …

Experiences Of Newly Licensed Registered Nurses Who Stay In Their First Jobs, Lisa D. Kirkland

Doctoral Dissertations

Most newly licensed registered nurses go to work in acute care hospitals, which means they enter an increasingly complex healthcare environment where they experience staffing shortages, high nurse-patient ratios, and workplace violence. The purpose of this study is to attempt to understand the experiences of newly licensed registered nurses who have endured the early years of bedside hospital nursing and continue to work in their first nursing job. The existential phenomenological philosophy of Merleau-Ponty serves as the guiding framework for this qualitative research study. Following IRB approval, criterion and snowball sampling were used to recruit newly licensed registered nurses who …

The Formation Of Youth-Led Participatory Networks In Urban Bangladesh: A Case Study Of The Bgreen Project, Fadia Hasan

Doctoral Dissertations

Through the lens of a participatory action research platform that I founded called The BGreen Project (BGreen), my research explores networked political economic connections that were developed as a result of this academic-community initiative. BGreen was a participatory action research platform that connected urban high school, college, university youth in an assortment of participatory/deliberative activities in the fields of education and environment. With their ongoing engagement in the participatory network called BGreen, Bangladeshi youth are negotiating their affiliation to diverse political economic structures (for example, their educational institutions) in creative ways and forging innovative methods of transformative participation as …

An Exploratory Study Of The Presence And Direction Of Agenda-Setting Effects Between Leading U.S. Foreign Policy Think Tanks And U.S. Newspapers, Dzmitry Yuran

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the roles news media and think tanks play in U.S. foreign policy in an analysis of their possible effects on each other’s agendas. In an analysis of salience of, or attention to, multiple countries over time in coverage from leading U.S. newspapers, The New York Times and Washington Post, and in published online materials from leading U.S. foreign policy think tanks, Brookings Institution and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the research looks at the presence, direction, and strength of agenda-setting effects in the construction of news agendas and attention foci of think tanks. Findings suggest that the …

Group Brainstorming In Organizations: Implementing The Functional Theory Of Group Decision-Making As A Means For Increasing Performance, Kyle B. Heuett

Doctoral Dissertations

Brainstorming was first introduced as a group focused method for generating ideas on behalf of an organization. Past studies on brainstorming have been inconclusive about the effect of certain types of brainstorming techniques on the number of ideas and the quality of ideas generated by groups. In seeking to develop different techniques for brainstorming research has lacked a theoretical guide that has led to mixed results at best about different brainstorming techniques. Further, brainstorming research conducting using experimental methods have lacked realism compared to industrial groups; specifically this lack of realism is evident in the history of brainstorming groups and …

The Relationship Between Demands And Resources And Teacher Burnout: A Fifteen-Year Meta-Analysis, Tammy Marie Stewart

Doctoral Dissertations

This meta-analysis explored the phenomenon of teacher burnout— the biggest contributor to teacher attrition (Owens, 2013; Unterbrink, 2014; Yu, 2015). The focus of this study was to use meta-analytical procedures to explore the relationship between burnout dimensions (i.e., emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and feelings of personal accomplishment) and specific demand and resource correlates. Demand correlates included work overload, role conflict, role ambiguity, and student misbehavior. Resource correlates included peer support, supervisory support, and decision-making. This meta-analytical research method encompassed fifteen years of published and unpublished studies from January 2000 through January 2015. A total of 116 studies met the following inclusion …

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …

Understanding The Dimensions Of Trust In Public Relations And Their Measurements, Joosuk Park

Doctoral Dissertations

Trust judgment of an organization’s publics validates the existence of an organization as well as being one of the most powerful moderators of public relations effectiveness. The ideas of trust as one of the key dimensions to explain relational status between an organization and its key publics has been around more than a decade. Over the last two decades, the idea of trust in fact has been showing rising prominence across many diversified studies of relationship and relationship management. In relationship management, one of the important goals of public relations is to build mutually beneficial relationships among organizations and their …

Generational Perceptions Of Productive/Unproductive Information Received From Management Through Different Communication Channels, Eva Lynn Cowell

Doctoral Dissertations

This exploratory study identified generational preferences for receiving information from management through different communication channels and determined if age predicted productivity for productive and unproductive information received through different communication channels. This is the first study to empirically examine the relationship between age cohorts, communication channel preferences, information categories, and productivity. Sample participants worked as Extension agents at a major land-grant university. The four generations represented in the sample utilized multiple communication channels and were geographically dispersed throughout the state. The survey was administered electronically and completed by 204 (74%) of the eligible 275 employees in the organization. Independent Samples …

University Alcohol Prevention, Public Relations And Organizational Legitimacy From The Parental Perspective, John E. Brummette Iii

Doctoral Dissertations

Developed from the public relations process model, the purpose of this study was to identify parental perceptions of university drinking norms and their relationship with parental perceptions of the organizational legitimacy of the university. This study used a web-based survey to assess an N = 173 parents of current university students at the University of Tennessee – Knoxville. The results of this study identified that parents have exaggerated misperceptions of college drinking that are related to their overall perceptions of the university in terms of organizational legitimacy. The study also found that parental awareness of university prevention efforts were strongly …