Phatic refers to the rhetorical function of creating effective communication channels, keeping them open, and establishing ongoing and fruitful relationships, all of which are vital in the age of digital rhetoric, social media, and global intercultural exchange. In this realm, the professional communicator functions less as an originator of new information and more as a space designer, a facilitator of others’ online interactions, a curator of user-generated content, and a communication leader. The phatic function—especially relevant to online interactions such as virtual teamwork, intercultural communication, and user help forums—deserves significant attention as a primary purpose for professional communication.

Our aim was to explore the influence of mobile learning on students’ acquisition of conceptual knowledge of business communication, as well as on the development of their communication skills. We compared the performance of three groups of students according to the pedagogical approach that we used with them: a mobile learning group, a conventional group, and a control group. Our findings suggest that a mobile learning intervention leads to an improvement in student performance in a formal assessment and that it will also have a positive impact on learning outcomes.

Distinctions between traditional service learning and critical service learning with a social justice focus are important when structuring professional writing courses and defining course outcomes. This article presents a hybrid pedagogical approach for designing a critical service-learning course that integrates a social justice curriculum while focusing specifically on reflection, context, and positionality. Detailing the course design and sharing reflections from students and the instructor, the author argues that the modified immersive situated service-learning approach provides professional communication students the opportunity to become agents of change.

The purpose of this study was to explore what corporations with good reputations communicate on social media. Based on a content analysis of 46 corporate Facebook pages from Fortune’s “World’s Most Admired Companies,” this study found that corporations communicate noncorporate social responsibility messages more frequently than corporate social responsibility (CSR) messages. When communicating CSR activities, corporations employed an informing strategy more often than an interacting strategy and included internal publics’ activities more than external publics. This study also found that publics engage more with noncorporate social responsibility messages than CSR messages, which may reflect public cynicism of CSR communication.

The value of experiential learning is widely acknowledged, especially for the development of communication skills, but students are not always aware of their own learning. While we can observe students practicing targeted skills during the experiential activity, the experience can also color their explicit understanding of those skills. Transfer of applied knowledge to managerial contexts requires an explicit grasp of the skills as appropriate solutions to the problems they encounter within the experiential team. This article reports the adaptation of assessment processes to encourage the reflection steps necessary for developing the desired managerial perspective on team communication.

Much research shows that students do not transfer learning well from one class to the next. This study was designed to investigate if students were transferring rhetorical strategies from their disciplinary courses to advanced writing courses. The findings suggest that business majors not only transferred rhetorical knowledge from their other courses, but they did so in a way that is invisible to both themselves and their own writing instructors.

This research establishes the role of communication education in employability by determining how employers of graduates view communication, identifying communication skills that employers view as relevant, and establishing whether these skills are included in communication courses. To achieve these aims, local businesses were surveyed, and the results were compared with communication course descriptors. The research shows, consistent with worldwide trends, that local employers value communication competencies highly when recruiting new graduates, and specific communication skills required in an industry reflect course content. However, some skills are still lacking, and the research questions where the responsibility lies in developing these skills.

This article, the second of a two-part series, presents 10 teaching innovations from the 2015 Association for Business Communication’s annual conference. Innovations include fresh approaches to teaching cross-cultural communication consulting, creating promotional material with graphical software, a Pecha Kucha approach to oral presentations, email skills, creating digital résumés and LinkedIn profiles, promoting flash-mob events via social media, rapid message packaging, and writing 140-character mission statements. Additional teaching materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on these websites: http://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments and http://www.salesleadershipcenter.com/research.html#mfa16 .

Students raised with pervasive technology are believed to have developed skills and ways of thinking that require new approaches to education. Often, social media is lauded as the answer, but a large gap remains in understanding student preferences regarding social media in courses. We uncover those preferences with data obtained from an anonymous survey of 368 students in large lecture classes. Our research focuses on social media preferences as well as differences in major, gender, and experience with social media for coursework. We discuss three lessons that can be applied immediately and suggestions for future research.

This article presents findings of a 2014 survey of 72 U.S. employers asking: Which oral communication skills are most utilized daily by new hires? Which oral skills are most important to company success? The study utilized Qualtrics to administer a mixed-methods, 12-question survey to employers of various sizes and across various industries. Findings show that employers rank (a) proper grammar use, (b) team communication, (c) ability to engage in conversation, (d) meeting participation, and (e) ability to speak well using the telephone as the most valued oral competencies for new hires as a factor in company success.

This article, the first of a two-part series, presents teaching 10 innovations from the 2015 Association for Business Communication’s 80th annual conference. The creative new assignments offered here include building listening skills by journaling, oral interpretation, positive message framing, storytelling, delivering bad news, persuasive messages, and learning by teaching. Additional assignment support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on these websites: http://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments and http://www.salesleadershipcenter.com/research.html#mfa16 .

This article explores the value of using embedding to extend the notion of first exposure learning in flipped classroom practices. It describes a preclass assignment for a meeting and negotiation skills course, in which students are instructed to observe an authentic business meeting, interview participants of the meeting, photograph the boardroom, draw a sketch of the seating arrangement, and write a reflective account. Its main argument is that immersion in corporate culture before class makes business communication training not only more authentic but also produces richer in-class discussions, ultimately leading to a level of metacognition associated with deep learning.

Supervisor communication competence and leadership style were used to predict specific employee outcomes. In the study, 276 participants working in various industries completed measures of communication competence and leadership styles about their direct supervisor along with measures of their job satisfaction, motivation, and organizational commitment. As predicted, effective and appropriate communication were both positively related to satisfaction, motivation, and organizational commitment. Furthermore, task- and relations-oriented leadership styles were both positively related to all three employee outcomes as well. Finally, regression analysis determined that effective communication and relations-oriented leadership were the best predictors of satisfaction, motivation, and organizational commitment.

Our assessment research suggests that quantitative business courses that rely primarily on algorithmic problem solving may not produce the deep learning required for addressing real-world business problems. This article illustrates a strategy, supported by recent learning theory, for promoting deep learning by moving students gradually from “well-structured” algorithmic problems with single correct answers to “ill-structured” real-world business problems that may have multiple correct answers and require an argument addressed to a specific audience. We show how these scaffolded communication assignments promote deep learning, and suggest ways that interested faculty can adapt the assignments to their own courses.

This case study examined the extent to which expected Gen Y traits surfaced in a well-managed U.S. company. The results indicate that certain Gen Y traits typically regarded as undesirable in the workplace are especially persistent, even in an optimal organizational setting, but others are not. The findings also reveal both expected and unexpected attitudes on the part of the Gen X and Boomer employees and managers. Such studies can help us move beyond generational stereotyping to more accurate, context-sensitive advice about cross-generational communication.

In this study, teams in a strategic management classroom were given one of two versions of an assignment related to the development of a team contract: independent individual reflections on desired team behaviors versus team-level reflections on desired behavioral norms. Results of a multivariate analysis of covariance, controlling for gender and individual prior achievement, indicated that teams who engaged in team-level reflection on desired team behavioral norms did not report higher teamwork satisfaction than those who had engaged in individual-level reflection on desired norms, but did report higher team effectiveness, effectiveness of their team member evaluation tool, and higher project scores.

This case study, an example of scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) research, explores student motivations to collaborate with both peer teams and community partners in a service-learning course. Written by one instructor and three undergraduates, the article draws on personal narratives, student reflections, and a postcourse student survey. Our experiences and findings suggest that in courses like these positive extrinsic factors motivate students to collaborate in ways that the extrinsic motivators in typical assignments do not, helping to foster trust and shared goals. We also share our work as an example of how to include student voices in SoTL work.