The purpose of this research was to identify the comfort levels of professionals with AI in various humanlike roles. A survey of 787 full-time working adults showed that more active AI users are comfortable with AI in many humanlike roles, such as a teammate or a performance coach. Less active AI users, however, are uncomfortable with AI in these roles. Leaders, managers, and educators should prepare employees and students to responsibly address the social and psychological outcomes of increasingly humanlike AI.

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.

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.

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 study was undertaken to provide a more complete understanding of how the selection of various media in virtual team settings affects student team coordination. A total of 75 teams of 304 undergraduate participants took part in the study. Participants were asked to complete surveys before and after the project. Findings suggest that well-coordinated teams appeared to have anticipated the usefulness of social networking and richer communication channels earlier in the project than less well-coordinated teams. After engaging in virtual teamwork, team members identified rich and social channels as more effective while finding less rich channels to be less effective.

We examined how 106 early-career professionals constructed video change messages involving a ban on remote working. These professionals constructed three types of statements: vision statements, direct change statements, and indirect change statements. Professionals with higher assertive-directing motivational values tended to first construct vision statements and secondly construct direct change statements, whereas professionals higher in analytic-autonomizing motivational values tended to first construct indirect change statements and secondly construct direct change statements. Overall, early-career professionals displayed strong group orientation in their rationale for change and low directness in communicating change.

We report our survey research about what American business professionals consider appropriate or civil mobile phone behavior during formal and informal meetings. The findings come from two of our recent research studies: an open-ended survey of 204 employees at a beverage distributor on the East Coast and a nationwide, random-sample survey of 350 business professionals in the United States. There were significant differences by age, group, gender, region, and income level. The differences between women and men were quite striking, with men nearly twice as likely to consider various mobile phone behaviors as acceptable in informal meetings.

Edward Hall's model of low-context and high-context cultures is one of the dominant theoretical frameworks for interpreting intercultural communication. This article reports a meta-analysis of 224 articles in business and technical communication journals between 1990 and 2006 and addresses two primary issues: (a) the degree to which contexting is embedded in intercultural communication theory and (b) the degree to which the contexting model has been empirically validated. Contexting is the most cited theoretical framework in articles about intercultural communication in business and technical communication journals and in intercultural communication textbooks. An extensive set of contexting propositions has emerged in the literature; however, few of these propositions have been examined empirically. Furthermore, those propositions tested most frequently have failed to support many contexting propositions, particularly those related to directness. This article provides several recommendations for those researchers who seek to address this popular and appealing yet unsubstantiated and underdeveloped communication theory.