In response to COVID-19, educational stakeholders are transferring traditional, face-to-face instruction to the online learning environment. The purpose of this study was to determine if business instructors’ use of immediate behaviors and clarity, which have been found to help business students overcome their writing apprehension in the face-to-face learning environment, can also be used to help business students to overcome their writing apprehension in an online learning environment. Findings indicated that instructor immediate behaviors and clarity are not interventions for writing apprehension in the online learning environment. The instructional strategies business instructors rely on in the face-to-face classroom did not have the same meaning or effect on the online classroom.

Design thinking, broadly understood as an organizational and entrepreneurial process aimed at innovative problem solving, has been productively incorporated by scholar-teachers in rhetoric, writing studies, and technical communication. Business communication offers similar opportunities. After briefly explaining design thinking and reviewing related scholarship and pedagogy, the article traces the process of creating an innovative course in business communication through each phase or mode of this recursive method: empathizing with users, defining the problem, ideating and prototyping solutions, and testing and evaluating the prototypes. The article positions course design as a project grounded in radical collaboration, with diverse colleagues as well as students.

Business writing has been a desired skill in managers. The existing traditional business writing assessment tools like written examination and hand-in assignments based on genre-specific instructions do not create a workplace writing environment. The business management students (n = 98) engage with an innovative Web 2.0–based business writing tool using blogging and LinkedIn. The findings show that the tool created a workplace-like context, a meaningful purpose, and a real audience for the students. The students make and build relationships in the professional community using their business writing. The challenges and recommendations for BPC faculty are discussed.

Vocational education (VE) has been a priority for employability globally. There is, however, limited research on what employers want from secondary school VE graduates regarding their communication skills. This study examined business English needs in Greek businesses and the English language skills taught in Greek vocational secondary schools. We surveyed 136 and interviewed 8 employers to identify the English language skills required in these businesses. The content of one prescribed VE English textbook was analyzed and eight teachers were interviewed about it. We found that employers emphasized oral business communication, which the textbook lacked, and we make suggestions for improvement.

It is unknown whether social presence in internet-based MBA courses enhances students’ career success. This study examined general self-efficacy and goal orientation mediation models to determine what strengthens MBA students’ social presence and their career planning self-confidence. Data included 278 online MBA students in an AACSB-accredited college of business. The regression analyses demonstrated that perceived general self-efficacy and goal orientation related to students’ career planning self-confidence. The mediation analyses revealed that internet self-efficacy, perceived general self-efficacy, and goal orientation had an indirect mediating effect on social presence and career planning. Implications are offered for business communication educators.

Through the reflections of professionals occupying a variety of corporate communication roles, our aim was to understand what the corporate communication profession looks like in the current marketplace and the career pathways professionals take. We find that roles and functions are “broad and blurred” and “evolving and escalating,” while pathways and job titles are “varied and vacillating” and “tentative and time bound.” Our article offers theoretical and practical implications for industry and academic professionals looking to bridge the gap between the classroom and the marketplace. We end with pedagogical and curricular implications for corporate communication educators.

The COVID-19 pandemic has cast digital communication competency into sharp relief. Rapid virtualization of how we work and learn has highlighted this challenge for business education. In response, the business communication syllabus must evolve to include digital communication competencies. Most of our students are comfortable with computer and Internet usage. However, our research uncovers a gap between their perceived and actual digital communication competency, as well as indications of stress in their online relationships. This article offers suggestions on creating a business communication syllabus in tune with learner and business needs given that digital communication is rapidly becoming the norm.

Understanding the expectations of employers contributes to the relevancy of business and professional communication (BPC) courses. Studies that bridge the gap between course content and workplace expectations support this process. This article presents findings from a scale development procedure to analyze BPC skills using a multimodal perspective. Employers ( N = 260) were asked what skills they perceive to be communication and how proficient they expect a recent college graduate to be to better understand the expectations that graduates face when entering the job market. The findings have implications for course design, curriculum selection, and program organization.

Persistent concerns about college graduates’ foundational skills for workforce preparedness compels educators to continue exploring ways to address them. Although effective communication is widely regarded as essential for entry-level professionals, which skills matter most may vary. Employers’ satisfaction with communication skills also shifts over time. This study compares regional employers’ and undergraduate business majors’ satisfaction with given communication skills and their perceptions about various skills’ importance. Results showed students rank importance and satisfaction similarly, and students’ satisfaction with their skills exceeded employers’. Regressions showed student satisfaction with specific skills predict their perceived importance. Implications for curriculum development are discussed.

This article offers readers 13 teaching innovations debuted at the 86th annual meeting of the Association for Business Communication held online. Assignment topics presented here include personal and professional development as well as oral communication and presentation skills. Additional assignment support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, internet links, and sample student projects—are downloadable from the Association for Business Communication and DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership websites.

This article offers readers 12 teaching innovations introduced at the Association for Business Communication’s 86th annual meeting held online in October 2021. This My Favorite Assignment 22nd edition introduces readers to classroom-ready ideas in analysis, critical thinking, and business writing. Assignment support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, internet links, and sample student projects—are downloadable from the Association for Business Communication and DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership websites.

This article explores social media relationships between undergraduates and their professors. It addresses social media efficacy’s and social media privacy’s impact on students’ trust in both their professors and university. An online survey of 448 business students found that students who are in social media relationships with professors are more concerned about their own social media privacy and that these students are less likely to trust their professors and the university. When it comes to perceptions of professor and university trust, students’ perceptions of social media privacy are more important than their social media connections with professors. Implications are discussed.

Business communication faculty who invite students to critically engage with issues of sustainability must consider students’ developmental readiness to do so, as these invitations can often seem uninvited. To promote students’ readiness for critical inquiry, faculty should adopt a developmental approach that attends to both cognitive and emotional aspects of learning. This article outlines three ways to frame critical discussions of sustainability: as a new conception of wealth, as a cultural way of knowing, and as an intergenerational social contract. To help faculty develop students’ capacity to engage critically, this article includes guided questions to support critical inquiry and a supplemental reading list.

Communicating clearly about their socially responsible activities is becoming increasingly important for companies, as a growing number of stakeholders with different goals, knowledge, and language skills seek information on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Furthermore, the ability to communicate clearly is particularly appreciated in the workplace. To fill a gap in CSR communication training, this article describes the development and preliminary evaluation of an interdisciplinary and multimodal online module whose goal is to train Dutch-speaking business students in the production of accessible CSR content in English. After presenting our module, we discuss its implications for future training and for corporate communication.

The rapid, widespread implementation of artificial intelligence technologies in workplaces has implications for business communication. In this article, the authors describe current capabilities, challenges, and concepts related to the adoption and use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in business communication. Understanding the abilities and inabilities of AI technologies is critical to using these technologies ethically. The authors offer a proposed research agenda for researchers in business communication concerning topics of implementation, lexicography and grammar, collaboration, design, trust, bias, managerial concerns, tool assessment, and demographics. The authors conclude with some ideas regarding how to teach about AI in the business communication classroom.

The discussion of sustainability reporting rarely addresses the inherent paradox within this concept—tremendous costs associated with sustainability efforts and lack of direct return on these investments. This study contributes to the discussion on sustainability by studying this paradox from the linguistic standpoint in order to answer a simple question: Why are sustainability reports produced? The study’s main contribution is evaluation of the place of sustainability reporting in the corporate communication genre: whether sustainability reporting is a vehicle of fair and objective sustainability disclosure or whether sustainability reporting belongs with marketing and promotional communication.

We analyze the self-rated writing skills of graduating business majors and perceptions on how much these skills changed during college. Subjective skill measures may be good proxies of objective skills, and affect outcomes such as career goals, job applications, and graduate school enrollment. The sample includes 436,370 students from 619 different institutions. On average and all else equal, business majors are estimated to be 17.6% less likely to report high writing skills at graduation when compared with other students and 11.5% less likely to report high gains in these skills during college. Average differences across disciplines are often large.

This article argues for using discourse analysis in business and management curricula to increase language awareness. To that end, an ecolinguistic discourse analysis approach (Stibbe, 2015a) for teaching sustainability is proposed. The article first explores sustainability discourse in two chief executive officer letters to shareholders followed by a classroom implementation enabling students to practise discourse analytical skills. Students examined vocabulary, hedging, modals, abstract and concrete representation, and social actors. Linguistic features were interpreted to reveal communicators’ underlying ideologies. This systematic analytical approach allows students to reflect on communication processes and how these processes can be used strategically when communicating in organizational contexts.

This study aims to compare how leading companies in Spain and in Spanish-speaking Latin America communicate corporate social responsibility or sustainability on their web pages. For this purpose, the pages of 68 companies were examined to establish the accessibility of such topics and to trace how their prominence and wording had evolved over time. The results show a trend toward greater uniformity in both Spain and Latin America, with corporate social responsibility/sustainability discourse gaining in prominence and “responsibility”-related terms being gradually replaced by those related to “sustainability.” Various cases hint that changes in terminology may be unrelated to any clear distinction between both terms.

This study examines how and why 20 instructors (17 tenure-line and 3 nontenure-line) in introductory service courses enact their pedagogical values and address current concerns (e.g., personal branding, LinkedIn, and applicant tracking systems) when teaching résumés and cover letters. Research methods included a demographics survey, qualitative interviews, and critical discourse analysis of assignment sheets and deidentified student examples. Results provide an opportunity to renegotiate gaps between Business and Professional Communication’s research and pedagogical methods, shifting from overemphasizing formatting and checklists and toward understanding job applications as workplace genre ecologies to encourage deeper learning.

This study examined student perceptions of an online case study development experience where students wrote their own case studies about workplace communication processes and created accompanying pedagogical materials. Students then shared their cases in small groups and engaged in dialogue. Students from organizational communication classes at four universities completed preevaluations ( n = 77) and postevaluations ( n = 67), providing quantitative and qualitative data. Analyses suggested that students perceived that the experience enhanced their understanding of course materials, aided them in connecting course materials to the real world, and enabled them to reflect on their own and their classmates’ organizational experiences.

To prepare students for the workforce, instructors of business, technical, and professional communication must incorporate team projects in their curriculum. However, both instructors and students have negative perceptions of team projects due to a variety of factors including team dysfunctions like social loafing. No prior study has examined the relationship between leader rapport management (LRM) and social loafing. LRM refers to the use of linguistic strategies to manage relationships between leaders and members. Therefore, we built and tested a model that examines the relationship between LRM and social loafing that is mediated by leader-member exchange and communication quality.

This article presents an observational case study of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Resource Manager working with community members through a contested project. Using the Aristotelian concepts of ethos, credibility, and character development, I examine ethos appeals the Resource Manager used to align Corps’s sustainability values with the community’s values. Transcribed interviews with community members reveal this alignment evolved through a coconstructed ethos negotiation process between the Resource Manager and the community. The article concludes with rhetorical and pedagogical insights gained from the case study that apply to conflict resolution in organizational communication.

Readers can explore 13 teaching innovations presented at the 2020 Association for Business Communication (ABC) annual international conference hosted online. Typically held in a large hotel ballroom, this year’s My Favorite Assignment sessions were adapted to an asynchronous virtual conference. These assignments are designed to teach managing complex communication, enhance cross-cultural communication, and building essential technical skills. This article is the second in a two-part series. The first appeared in the June 2021 issue. Additional teaching materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on the ABC website: https://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments .

Business adopted a terminology of sustainability to defend, then justify, and finally explain practices that acknowledged resource limitations as inherent in the business environment. Tracing the rhetoric across a half century of business use demonstrates an expansion of the concept of sustainability to encompass managerial attention to finite human, capital, and political resources. A rhetoric of sustainability seemed to promise a revolution in management practice, and practitioners have indeed adopted principles of complex systems. The sustainability terminology retains its narrower focus on environmentally responsible corporate activities, however, and management communication pedagogy has not yet recognized the emerging discourse of adaptive communication practices.

Because few studies of disciplinary business writing have examined whether language features play a role in instructor assessment of student writing, this study explored the relationship between student language use and instructor essay scores. Undergraduate business students wrote a case study critique as part of their final exam, and their critiques were evaluated by their instructors for theory integration and essay structure. Student language use was analyzed in terms of error rate, lexical sophistication, lexical diversity, and phrasal complexity. Whereas lexical sophistication positively predicted instructor scores, error rate was a negative predictor of their assessment of business student writing.

This article reports on assessments of business letters assigned to students in a business communication course. Assessments were performed by faculty in other disciplines and local business professionals, with each sampled assignment evaluated by one faculty and one business professional. Overall, the assessments by the two groups were similar in terms of evaluation items related to quality of content and organization. However, faculty evaluators rated the letters lower on items related to mechanics, while business professional evaluators rated the letters lower on items related to professionalism. The paired assessments revealed only limited consistency between the two evaluator groups.

The instructor developed an assessment tool based on Service-Learning (S-L) for developing business and professional communication (BPC) skills in business school students in India ( N = 117). The students practiced their organizational, leadership, and interpersonal communication skills in an authentic, contextual, and workplace atmosphere during this S-L assessment project. The effectiveness of the assessment tool has been studied with a posttest and then pretest. The need for an innovative and holistic BPC skills assessment tool is discussed. The article also presents implications of the project for students and pedagogy along with the challenges in using the assessment project.

This article features 12 teaching innovations presented at the 2020 Association for Business Communication (ABC) annual international conference held online due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Readers can explore the classroom methods designed to enhance students’ individual and career skills, critical thinking, teamwork, and report writing skills—many are designed to be taught online. This article is the first in a two-part series. The next article will appear in the September 2021 issue. Additional teaching materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on the ABC website: https://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments .

This article reports on the use of discourse maps in conjunction with genre and discourse analysis to help teach communicative practices for contract negotiation. Using one map as a baseline to understand the intertextual process of negotiating a contract in communication with business clients and counterpart lawyers, other maps can zoom in and examine the discursive features of email genres, cover letters, and different versions of the contract under negotiation. The type of discourse maps developed in this study can be utilized for task-based writing materials and role-play activities that facilitate the authentic experience of negotiating a business deal.

This article explicates the operationalization of a theoretically robust framework in the teaching of business communication at an institute of higher learning. This article reimagines the design of a business communication course that focuses on the coalescence of both decoding and encoding processes of messages as a unified pedagogical approach in teaching business communication. This approach is in contrast with more conventional approaches in designing communication courses, which tend to prioritize one process over the other. Participants in the study acknowledged the instrumentality in the course design in promoting communicative values with real-world impact.

Expressing thanks in the workplace involves thoughtfulness and skill. Based on a gratitude journaling exercise over the course of a month by 58 American professionals (Study 1) and a survey of over 1,200 American professionals (Study 2), this research demonstrates the many written and spoken ways in which professionals value receiving thanks in low-effort, high-effort, minor-accomplishment, and major-accomplishment situations. The research suggests gratitude expressions can be interpreted through media synchronicity theory and social comparison theory. A variety of training and teaching approaches are offered.

What reasons do applicants use to write résumés, and what reasons do employers use to evaluate them? This article advocates for teaching reasons as a way to empower writers to make more nuanced, adaptive résumé decisions. Drawing from a study of 63 students, 20 advisors, and 24 employers, the article touches on résumé format, sections, and items; then it moves beyond formal features to compare eight reasons that participants used as a framework in their decision making: relevance, recency, value, personality, fluff, unprofessionalism, discrimination, and applicant fit. It ends with pedagogical suggestions for teaching this framework alongside résumé formal features.

Leveraging a team’s diverse perspectives can be a powerful way to foster team innovation. A common approach to leverage team differences involves tool-based approaches, including brainstorming, mind-mapping, and whiteboarding. However, the effective use of ideational tools as a means to innovation often assumes high levels of team cohesion and productivity—dynamics that may not be safe to assume, especially in teams with high levels of diversity. This study investigates how workplace teams at a Biotech company use discourse to innovate, and in doing so, instantiate a larger rhetorical practice known as difference-driven inquiry.

While previous research in business communication has surveyed business and professional communication instructors regarding their courses, it has not yet asked instructors about additional factors that affect their ability to teach and their students’ ability to learn. These factors include job satisfaction, institutional and collegial support, academic rank, physical teaching environment, teaching and learning resources, and student issues. This study examines the results of a survey of business and professional communication instructors regarding these factors, discusses implications for the disciplines of business and professional communication, and suggests additional avenues for advocacy and research.

Thematic analysis of interviews with 22 managers highlight their perspectives on exemplary and unacceptable workplace communication skills. Exemplary skills were perceived to be relatability, documentation, and audience awareness/adaptation, while unacceptable skills were verbal aggression, deception, and defensive communication behaviors. The findings contribute to closing-the-gap research by identifying highly notable skills—both positive and negative—on typical lists of business and professional communication skills. This study also enriches anticipatory socialization scholarship by its application to vocational preparation. Business and professional communication instructors can use the findings here when deciding what topics to emphasize in a course.

This nationwide study of business communication instructors examined course delivery, course outlook, topics and depth of coverage, social media and technology coverage, diversity coverage, critical thinking, and accessibility. The outlook for the course appears positive and promising, and instructors continue to add content to the course. An important finding is that business communication instructors’ level of confidence in technology significantly affects how they cover technology-mediated communication. Therefore, we suggest professional associations and higher education institutions should provide more opportunities for voluntary training in these newer communication technologies. Further research is needed about the strain placed on business communication instructors.

This article reports on the representation and operationalization of interpersonal attention in complaint management by comparing business textbooks, service recovery research, and situated practice. While textbooks commonly recommend the use of interpersonal strategies when writing complaint refusals, service recovery research points toward contextual differences in this regard. We use an authentic sample of complaint refusals from an intercultural business-to-business setting to show that the decontextualized recommendations in textbooks are not always applied in actual practice and that this lack of interpersonal attention need not be problematic.

Business remains a popular major for international students in the United States. Little is known, however, about how these students fare in business communication (BCOM) classes. This qualitative study evaluates the challenges and needs of English as an additional language (EAL) students in BCOM courses at a private university in the United States. We surveyed and interviewed 15 BCOM instructors and 30 students previously enrolled in BCOM. Results reveal faculty are aware of some, but not all, of the linguistic, cultural, emotional, time, and accommodation challenges EAL students face. We discuss suggestions for accommodating EAL students’ unique needs in BCOM courses.

This article outlines opportunities and challenges of teaching neurologically diverse students in the business communication course, providing basic resources and information for instructors to supplement their knowledge and pedagogical ability to support neurodiverse students. While the business communication course may represent obstacles for neurodiverse students, it also provides the ideal opportunity for them to practice and develop the soft skills that are essential to their success. Included are implications for neurodiversity as competitive advantage as employers look to harness the unique talents of neurodivergent graduates through active recruitment programs and universities increase programming to support these diverse and talented students.

Readers can explore 13 teaching innovations presented at the 2019 Association for Business Communication annual international conference in Detroit, Michigan. These assignments are designed to add fuel to oral and written persuasion, including the practical use of rhetorical tools. Ideas to advance learners’ professional development are presented. Also, clever experiential learning techniques are designed to inculcate team-building skills. This article is the second in a two-part series. The first appeared in the June 2020 issue. Additional teaching materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on the Association for Business Communication website: https://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments

This article is the first in a two-part series. It features 13 teaching innovations selected from the 60 My Favorite Assignments presented at the 2019 Association for Business Communication’s annual international conference in Detroit, Michigan. Pedagogy presented includes experiential learning methods to teach how to deliver peer feedback, new approaches for incorporating the Internet and social media into learning experiences, and a boost on a classic topic, ethics.