This study uses the Structurational Model of Identification (SMI) to investigate how resident primary care physicians (PCPs) manage multi-level identity conflicts during the routine activity of the medical office visit. Drawing from interviews with 27 physicians and more than 47 hours of office visit observations, the data build a Structurational Model of Identity Conflict. The model depicts how physicians encounter a taxonomy of identity-centered constraints, including financial (e.g., insurance availability), material (e.g., computer-use), and temporal (e.g., waiting times), among others, that disrupt their identification during office visits, creating multi-level (e.g., relational vs professional) identity conflicts. PCPs created and shared care appropriations (i.e., workarounds) to reposition their identities and re-engage with important social contexts of work (i.e., compassionate, patient-centered care). The model also depicts how the micro-level strategies that PCPs employed to manage their identity tensions during office visits were shared, routinized, and reified, generating structurational change. This study offers practical implications for professions beyond medicine, such as education, social work, and legal aid, where practitioners must balance competing structural demands with relationship-oriented goals through creatively appropriating identity and work tasks.

This paper reviews the state of the literature on swift trust in temporary systems. I offer a taxonomy of team/group contexts examined in extant multidisciplinary swift trust research and demonstrate how swift trust conceptualizations have situated meanings based on context. I then propose a future agenda for swift trust research in the areas of communication competency, emotional regulation, and artificial intelligence use. I emphasize the emergence of swift trust with the act of communication, arguing for scholars to examine the cognitive rationalizations and contemporary team features underlying the surface-level communicative actions typically associated with swift trust development. This review offers theoretical contributions by revealing the various study designs and methodologies that are used to analyze swift trust development. Practically, this study provides managers with insights into the diverse ways that individuals suspend doubt and use category-based information processing to trust under time pressure, which is vital to contemporary team success.

Rape crisis advocates (RCAs) are high-stakes volunteers (HSVs) that provide advocacy services to survivors of sexual violence during forensic examinations. Given that supporting survivors can be emotionally difficult, practicing resilience is foundational to their volunteerism. Drawing on 23 interviews with RCAs, results demonstrate that RCAs communicatively construct resilience through practicing Buzzanell's (2010) five communication processes of resilience. This interpretive analysis contributes theoretically and practically to feminist organizational communication research by illuminating how work meaningfulness is embedded within resilience in RCA volunteerism. In offering how RCAs distinctly practice each resilience communicative process, we reveal sources and mechanisms through which RCAs construct work meaningfulness. Thus, our results problematize previous resilience research by demonstrating its critical connection to meaningful work, yet lack of scholarly attention to it. We also offer theoretical implications for HSVs through suggesting that the motives attracting volunteers to high-stakes volunteerism help them communicatively enact resilience when they endure hardships at work.

"Wine Mom" culture has recently been popularized through social media, entertainment, and household products. Although numerous popular editorials and blogs scrutinize the behaviors associated with wine mom culture, little academic research has systemically investigated the topic. Thus, the current study uses semi-structured interviews (N = 22) and a phronetic iterative approach to explore how cis-gendered mothers-the targeted population of these messages-make sense of sarcastic "wine mom" messages, which can potentially trivialize or glamourize alcohol use and misuse. Sensemaking theory broadly informs how mothers interpret and are influenced by the wine mom messages (WMM) they see on artifacts scattered throughout store shelves or in people's homes-such as signs, dish towels, or clothing. We build a taxonomy outlining the range with which cis-gendered mothers interpret WMM and explore their accounts and rationalizations of how WMM messages have effects on the social, psychological, and physical health of mothers.

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced the use of color-coded COVID-19 guidance maps to communicate varying levels of transmission based on local public health data and infrastructure capacity. This study explores the application of an extended Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to understand how color-coded COVID-19 guidance, pandemic fatigue, and risk perception influence intentions to seek COVID-19 risk information and engage in preventative behaviors. Through two separate studies comprising nationally representative samples in the U.S. (N =169 and N =148), conducted at different points during the pandemic, we examine the effect of these factors on intentions to seek COVID-19 risk information and intentions to engage in preventative behaviors. Study 1, conducted in November 2020, focused on these behavioral intentions before vaccine availability, while Study 2, conducted in March 2022, examined these behavioral intentions as the pandemic evolved and vaccines were widely accessible. Path analysis using OLS regression was used to evaluate the models proposed in each study. Our findings highlight that while color-coded risk maps significantly influenced preventive behavior intentions, their impact on information-seeking intentions was less consistent. Results surrounding the influence of pandemic fatigue are mixed, with pandemic fatigue leading to increased risk information seeking in Study 1 and greater preventative behavioral intentions in Study 2. This study offers implications and recommendations for public health officials responsible for communicating complex, prolonged, and location-specific health information.

The yips are a complex phenomenon that leaves athletes unable to perform previously mastered athletic skills. Here, we coin the term athletic skills mental blocks (ASMBs) to collectively define the phenomenon, which has garnered several terms across scholarship and media outlets. Previous ASMBs literature is often post-positivist in nature, offers minimal insight into complex firsthand experiences, includes small sample sizes, and/or analyzes one or two sports. Through a pilot study of 12 tumbling athletes, and a primary study including 16 collegiate and professional athletes and coaches from baseball, golf, and tumbling, this study offers an in-depth understanding of ASMBs that highlights shared ASMB rationalizations across multiple sports. Guided by sensemaking theory, we use a rigorous thematic analysis to draw out themes within four aspects of the experience: phenomenon, perceived causes, strategies to overcome, and consequences. We highlight the role communication plays in ASMBs sensemaking through revealing the importance of internal dialogue and communication with coach, family, and teammates. We offer theoretical implications by illuminating how naming/labeling processes and identity are vital components to ASMB sensemaking and generating an ASMB sensemaking model that can be used in future research. Practically, this research serves sports organizations by expanding the vocabulary surrounding ASMBs and helps destigmatize the mental health complexities inherent in ASMBs across sports.

Hospital nurses encounter a demanding workplace. Advancements in technology and continued staffing shortages increase and complicate the communication and organizational expectations and restrictions placed upon hospital nurses, although the organizational resources and support nurses are offered can remain unchanged, or worse, diminish. This study explores nurses’ experiences of workplace communication overload (CO), and their interpretations of how CO occurs alongside obstacles to risk and safety communication —a vital form of communication in hospital work. Using a combination of semi-structured, narrative interviews (N = 12) and focus groups (N = 8, 26 participants), and driven by a theoretical conceptualization of CO, this study reveals that the most fundamental obstacle to nurses’ risk and safety communication at work is the practice of mandating. When nurses are mandated, they are forced to work overtime, exceeding the number of hours agreed upon in their contracts, due to (continued) staffing shortages. Nurses explain that mandating, as a routine organizational practice, creates general states of feeling overwhelmed in everyday work life, which is a central theoretical dimension of CO. This state of feeling overwhelmed strips nurses of their patience and cognitive capacity to adequately process and respond to incoming risk and safety messages, and/or grasp their level of importance. Study implications are offered.Keywords: Hospital workerscommunication overloadmandating; burnout, risk and safety communication Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

The COVID-19 health pandemic acted as a punctuated event that spurred rapid change in healthcare delivery, pushing us to adopt new socio-cultural norms and ways of communicating. The pandemic also altered several long-standing structures within healthcare organizations. To better understand peoples' perceptions of how the pandemic shifted technological structures within healthcare, this study examines a telemedicine (TM) Reddit forum. Analyzing language use on Reddit offered a bottom-up means of examining the public's feelings, understandings, and conceptualizations of TM. Studying language use provides rich insight into how people experience and make sense of the world around them. We specifically examined three time periods: (1) prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, (2) the two years at the center of the outbreak, wherein TM coverage increased-high-risk COVID, and (3) the point at which COVID-19 community risk levels largely diminished -low-risk COVID. Using LIWC, we studied around 1500 conversations posted in the TM forum from 2015 to 2022. Results reveal how people's language use and emotions surrounding TM meaningfully shifted over-time, along with the pandemic stages. Specifically, negative emotion language significantly increased and positive emotion language significantly decreased during Time 3-low-risk COVID. Use of body and health words increased throughout the time periods, and there were no significant differences in cognitive processing words use-which were used very frequently across all time periods. Theoretical and practical implications are offered.

Working professionals find meaning in their work and consider their professions as significant markers of identity. Healthcare organizations represent complex and challenging environments in that they are comprised of a collection of distinctly specialized and interdependent clinicians who must unremittingly and carefully coordinate with one another to achieve patient‐centered care. Communication plays a critical role in healthcare professionals' identity construction and how professional, organizational, and institutional logics and socialization construct clinicians' identity and perceptions of their work and job roles. Future directions for the study of identity in healthcare organizations are offered, most notably within the realm of interprofessional healthcare teams and productive collaboration.

This paper uses SIDE theory and an information seeking lens to examine the types of information and support messages (N = 126,977 posts) veterans seek on the social networking site Reddit regarding medical marijuana use. A combination of automated text analysis strategies paired with thematic analysis produced eight themes: Doctor Patient Conversations, Drug Test, Legality, Legal Policy, Prescription Drug Use/Other Substance Use, Point of View, Reasons for Use, and V.A. Findings reveal that a large portion of veterans discuss how medical marijuana can be used to self-medicate for a number of issues, including PTSD, anxiety, and sleep deprivation. Results also highlighted missing topics within veterans' conversations about medical marijuana use. For instance, veterans rarely discuss the strategies they use to talk to their doctor about their medical marijuana use. Practical implications and directions for future research are offered.

The health information environment surrounding COVID-19 is complex, with varying and competing information. This study uses the risk information seeking and processing model (RISP) to examine COVID-19 information seeking and avoiding among young adults. Pandemic fatigue is also operationalized and tested as a more nuanced measure of negative affective response within the RISP framework. Survey results (N = 527) reveal pandemic fatigue predicts information seeking and avoidance, but may have a weaker influence on these outcome variables than the RISP's original construct of negative affective response. Additionally, the original RISP model achieved slightly more explanatory power in predicting risk information seeking than our revised RISP model, using pandemic fatigue as an alternative measure of negative affective response. These findings indicate that contemporary concepts such as pandemic fatigue may be incorporated into applications of the RISP model, thus allowing researchers to evaluate other types of negative affective responses to risk and further expanding the utility of the model. Theoretical implications and practical recommendations for public health officials and health care workers are discussed.

Hospitals represent complex organizations where a range of hospital workers, from physicians to administrators, encounter a deluge of information they must quickly process and act upon. New technologies implemented to streamline patient care, like electronic health records and wearable technologies, have both enhanced and complicated communicative exchanges between hospital workers and their organizations. Hospital workers feeling over saturated with workplace communication, and thus unable to effectively manage or interpret workplace messages, experience what has been labeled communication overload, which can negatively impact worker productivity and concentration. This study examines hospital workers (N = 303) in a Midwestern U.S. healthcare network, and uses structural equation modeling to offer a preliminary theoretical model that demonstrates the effects and outcomes of communication overload in high-risk organizations. The model offers theoretical implications through depicting communication overload as indirectly related to burnout, job satisfaction, and organizational identification through participation in decision-making and organizational safety climate. Results suggest that even if communication overload is an expected state in high-risk organizations, managers can prevent its negative effects on workers' job attitudes by providing workers opportunities to get involved in organizational decision-making and constructing a robust organizational safety climate. Finally, we suggest pairings of organizational safety communication channels and sources through which high quantities of safety information can be communicated without communicatively overloading workers.

Purpose Although resilience is heavily studied in both the healthcare and organizational change literatures, it has received less attention in healthcare information technology (HIT) implementation research. Healthcare organizations are consistently in the process of implementing and updating several complex technologies. Implementations and updates are challenged because healthcare workers often struggle to perceive the benefits of HITs and experience deficiencies in system design, yet bear the brunt of the blame for implementation failures. This combination implores healthcare workers to exercise HIT resilience; however, how they talk about this construct has been left unexplored. Subsequently, this study explores healthcare workers' communicative constitution of HIT resilience. Design/methodology/approach Twenty-three physicians ( N = 23), specializing in oncology, pediatrics or anesthesiology, were recruited from one healthcare organization to participate in comprehensive interviews during and after the implementation of an updated HIT system DIPS. Findings Thematic analysis findings reveal physicians communicatively constituted HIT resilience as their (1) convictions in the continued, positive developments of newer HIT iterations, which marked their current adaptive HIT behaviors as temporary, and (2) contributions to inter-organizational HIT brainstorming projects in which HIT designers, IT staff and clinicians jointly problem-solved current HIT inadequacies and created new HIT features. Originality/value Offering both practical for healthcare leaders and managers and theoretical implications for HIT and resilience scholars, this study's results suggest that (1) healthcare leaders must work diligently to create a culture of collaborative HIT design in their organization to help facilitate the success of new HIT use, and (2) information technology scholars reevaluate the theoretical meaningfulness a technology's spirit and reconsider the causal nature of a technology's embedded structures.

Guided by structurational divergence (SD) theory, this study examined the presence and impact of unresolved tensions surrounding safety issues among hospital workers. Using a two-study design, data were gathered for Study 1 from focus groups and interviews involving 40 hospital employees at two hospitals. Thematic analysis indicated workers experienced SD-cycles marked by unresolved conflict, immobilization, and erosion of development. Study 2 surveyed (N = 303) workers within the same hospital network to examine the impact of unresolvable safety issues as both the outcome of SD and the antecedent to workers’ intent to leave. The conceptual model tested shows the destructive outcomes of SD on safety climate, where higher levels of SD lead to lower perceptions of safety climate.

This study explores hospital workers’ experiences with workplace communication overload and its implications for effective safety and risk messaging in hospital organizations. We use a multi-step thematic analysis of interview (N = 12) and focus group (N = 8, 28 participants) data collected from hospital workers to analyze how they describe specific organizational communication channels influencing their communication overload. We specifically examine how workers’ socially constructed channel affordances and constraints for sending/receiving safety information provide meaning to their communicatively overloaded states. Hospital workers explained that asynchronous channels such as e-mail and voicemail aggravated communication overload, while synchronous channels such as team huddles alleviated it. We discuss the implications of these results for the communication overload model by pointing to violations of communication channel preference and literature on the social affordances of communication channels. Study limitations and future directions are offered.

Objective: Causes of and treatments for long-COVID syndrome remain unknown. Drawing on uncertainty management theory (UMT), this study elucidates the communicative nature of crowdsourced medicine as a means by which COVID "long-haulers" respond to their poorly understood illness. Methods: 31,892 posts on the long-haulers subreddit (r/covidlonghaulers) were analyzed, starting with its creation date, July 24th, 2020, until January 7, 2021. The Meaning Extraction Method was used to identify clusters of words that mathematically group together across the text observations. Results: Analyses yielded 16 distinct factors of words, which we thematized based on their composition, the data, and UMT. The 16 themes encompassed symptoms (e.g., pain, respiratory, sensory), diagnostic concerns (testing, diagnosis), broad health concerns (immunity, physical activity, diet), chronicity, support, identity, and anxiety. Conclusion: Findings provide a succinct, yet robust set of themes reflecting the information-seeking (i.e., "This is happening to me") and support-seeking functions of long-haulers' talk (i.e., "Is this happening to you?"). Findings have implications for collective uncertainty management, online crowdsourcing, and patient advocacy. Practice implications: We recommend that health care providers employ sensitivity when addressing the anxiety that long-haulers are experiencing while also validating that their physical symptoms are real. Online communities help long-haulers manage their uncertainty.

This study draws upon sensemaking theory to (a) explore the cues healthcare providers extract from their workplace environment to make sense of their advanced information technology (AIT) workarounds and (b) offer an AIT workaround sensemaking model for future research. A thematic analysis was conducted using interview data from 27 (N = 27) physicians and nurses in one hospital organization. In addition to understanding how AIT-use issues are bracketed and labeled, this study demonstrates the important role workplace communication factors play in providers' retrospective AIT workaround sensemaking. Providers frequently made sense of their AIT workarounds by claiming AIT use (a) negatively impacts organizational communication and (b) constrains verbal and nonverbal immediacy with patients - both of which conflicted with their acquired mental models for patient care. Theoretical and practical implications for healthcare leaders are offered in addition to future directions.

We surveyed ninety-seven 12-step community members from IntheRooms.com – a recovery social networking site – to investigate the relationship between 12-step meeting format (face-to-face or videoconferencing) and members’ perceptions of meeting effectiveness, social support quality, recovery network quality, and meeting accessibility. Findings suggest 12-step members perceive more challenges than advantages to be associated with VC 12-step meetings. Moreover, FtF 12-step meetings are associated with significantly higher perceptions of (a) meeting effectiveness, (b) support quality, and (c) recovery network quality, yet not perceived as (d) more accessible than VC meetings. Our findings suggest that VC is a valuable supplemental tool for 12-step group communication, but it should not replace FtF meetings—which are more productive in facilitating the achievement of 12-step groups’ health goals.

This paper extends Pentland and Feldman's (2007) narrative network method and uses it to more clearly understand how new technology affordances and digital spaces impact storytelling and enactment during and immediately after a crisis. To do this, I (a) examine the meaningful roles human motivation and feelings play in online storytelling and enactment, and (b) analyze how context impacts storytelling and enactment, and therefore the construction of narrative networks. Specifically, I analyze a series of Facebook messages exchanged during a recent, very publicized campus crisis to reveal the nonlinear digital stories that are co-constructed online to keep others informed. I demonstrate how crisis-affected populations capitalize on the affordances offered by social media to enact stories, correct stories, and ultimately to aid in sensemaking and sense-giving after a crisis event. Implications of new technology affordances for creating and updating narratives throughout times of high uncertainty are provided.