Dissent is an important organizational process. Scholars often examine face-to-face dissent, but social media is increasingly central in dissent interactions. This study analyzed 592 organizational dissent tweets, also collecting the structure of users’ follower networks. Structural topic modeling revealed four topics of organizational dissent: (a) time and rhythms of work, (b) unreasonable expectations, (c) frustrations with people, and (d) emotional anguish. The COVID-19 pandemic shaped organizational communication in myriad ways, and sentiment analysis of our data collected in 2020 and 2021 revealed that tweets became less positive over time. Network structure also predicted sentiment, with tweet negativity highest with small follower networks and fewer connections among followers. We interpret these results in light of context collapse, with results extending dissent literature by highlighting the emotional nature of public dissent.

Layoffs pose significant challenges for organizations, as employees must collectively make sense of traumatic change while continuing to work together. Drawing on data from meetings and follow-up interviews, this study examined how employees processed uncertainty, avoided blame, coped with survivors' guilt, and used work to manage emotional strain. Over time, they attempted to construct a 'new normal', but their communication revealed ongoing disturbances in healing. The findings extend communication research by emphasizing the iterative, identity-driven, and emotionally complex nature of sensemaking during and after change, illustrating how healing is nonlinear and marked by both progress and disruption. Meetings emerged as key sites for collective emotional sensemaking. Practically, the findings suggest ways that leaders can avoid superficial symbolic gestures and instead foster ongoing dialogue, emotional processing, and collective accountability. Meaning-making during change should be understood as a participatory process that unfolds over time, requiring leaders to accommodate divergent experiences and emotions.

The present study examined organizational and group socialization processes at the team-level, focusing on how workgroup members socialize a new leader. Results revealed the interplay of communicative behaviors on the part of the designated leader and team members. In early meetings, team member used stories and humor to negotiate continuity and change with the leader even as she recognized her ignorance of departmental practices and norms. Simultaneously, the leader charted new strategies and structures for the department, eventually moving from observing departmental procedures to owning her role as leader. Over time, communication focused less on departmental experiences before her arrival as she fully assimilated into the team.

This study examined volunteer coping and resilience processes in emotionally-taxing work. Based on the reflections of 34 client-facing volunteers with a nonprofit that supports people experiencing homelessness, survivors of human trafficking, and refugee children, we identified four primary processes of volunteer resilience: (a) preemptive support offered at an individual level, (b) promotion of periodic rest from volunteering, (b) reframing and transforming the struggle, and (c) invoking spiritual identity anchors. These findings contribute to resilience theorizing by underscoring the necessary role of both routine social support and rest from emotion work in resilience processes.

Groups are ever-present in organizational contexts. This chapter reviews research on workgroups, particularly focusing on the overlap between organizational and group communication processes. In particular, the chapter examines group identity, group leadership, and group conflict in organizations. The chapter also considers diversity and virtual groups before concluding with recommendations for practice.

This research examined how camp counselors anticipate and experience inevitable exit from roles centrally characterized as requiring intensive emotional work. This study extended previous inquiry on planned exit from organizations, examining the way known exit shapes socialization, identification, and social support in helping professions. The researchers analyzed counselor membership and exit experiences through three primary themes regarding inevitable exit, identification, and support. This study theoretically contributes to current scholarship on organizational exit and offers practical insight regarding member care in the workplace, specifically demonstrating that members often hyper-invest or completely withdraw as they anticipate inevitable exit from emotionally-intensive roles.

Organizations without healthy dissent stagnate from myopic thinking. Previous research has examined how employees might dissent to supervisors or coworkers, but little research has focused on how dissent might be expressed to multiple audiences simultaneously. Dissent conversations might happen only once or might be repeated over time, but the ways in which dissent processes unfold over time has also been neglected in past research. The present study examined biweekly meetings in the fundraising department of a nonprofit organization for 2 years to explore organizational dissent across time and to reveal possible nuances in the ways in which dissenters express disagreement. Results revealed several dissent topics repeated during the data collection period with mixed results-some of these topics were resolved whereas others were not. Two dissent conversations emerged as particularly meaningful events in the history of the department. At the same time, these data illustrated dissent expressed to multiple audiences (a single dissenter simultaneously talking to a supervisor and multiple coworkers) and dissent expressed by multiple dissenters. These forms of collective dissent extend previous models of organizational dissent that typically conceptualize a conversation between a single dissenter and a single dissent audience.

In this study, we examined online dissent as expressed by members and former members of a U.S. based megachurch. Our interpretive analysis of the data illuminated three audiences of dissent (i.e., self, others, the pastor) and uncovered three clear aims (i.e., individual sensemaking, community defense, providing corrective direction) of dissent processes in this non-secular organization as enacted online. Taken together, these audiences and aims complicate several taken-for-granted assumptions embedded in current models of dissent processes and extend scholarly insight into dissent in religious organizations.

Marked by repetitive and negatively valenced disclosures, verbal rumination is a common strategy used to cope with challenges or manage complex situations that often have detrimental consequences for individuals and the organizations to which they belong. To investigate factors that might encourage or inhibit verbal rumination in organizations, the present study examined the quality of coworker and supervisor communication and perceived stress in workplace settings. Results revealed the interconnected nature of workplace relationships in terms of encouraging or inhibiting verbal rumination. These findings also emphasized the importance of relationships with supervisors as a deterrent to verbal rumination and reinforced the strong connection between stress and rumination, offering important implications for theoretical work related to interpersonal communication in organizations.

This study sought to explore potential differences in organizational dissent seen as troublemaking and dissent seen as problem-solving. Participants completed open-ended items that measured perceptions of others' dissent. Results revealed two key attributions that dissent audiences make: principled versus personal advantage dissent and appropriate versus inappropriate dissent. Results also demonstrated nuance in connecting dissent expressions and others' perceptions of dissenters. Finally, the study draws attention to one aspect of residual communication, which includes communication about dissenters after they have expressed disagreement and which defines the context for future dissent.

Dissent is an integral part of decision making, and dissent processes may be particularly on display in workgroups in which group and organizational pressures intersect. The present study examined workgroup meetings in 3 organizations, focusing on how dissent influenced interactions that immediately followed the disagreement as well as how dissent shaped group meetings beyond those initial interactions. Immediately following dissent, groups typically tabled the dissenting member's concerns, either because the group could not resolve the dissent or because the group leader chose not to discuss the dissent further. A longer view of these meetings revealed phases of dissent interspersed within periods of focused work. These findings make 2 contributions to scholarship. First, much of the literature on organizational and group dissent focuses on variables that affect dissent, but the present study examines how one dissent event influences future events. These data revealed groups' keen awareness of past dissent as they expressed and responded to present dissent. Second, 2 breakpoints emerged as particularly important in the history of these groups. and those breakpoints revealed a dialectic mechanism that lay beneath dissent interactions. In one instance, managerialism seemed to subvert dissent, whereas in the other instance, a synthesis developed as the group developed new norms for interaction.

Organizational wrongdoing remains a persistent, prevalent problem, one that leads to exponentially more injuries, deaths, and cost than street crime in the United States each year. Whistleblowing has become one of the primary ways in which wrongdoing is exposed and investigated, but without support from key stakeholders, whistleblowing may not affect constructive change. This study used an attribution theory framework to explore relationships between stakeholders’ perceptions of different types of whistleblowers. Specifically, we varied whistleblowers’ motives (altruistic and selfish) and involvement in wrongdoing (complicit or innocence) to test their effects on stakeholders’ intentions to ostracize the whistleblower and their perceptions of the whistleblower’s likeability, legitimacy, and three dimensions of credibility (goodwill, trustworthiness, and competence). Respondents were composed of two stakeholder groups, fraternity and sorority members and university alumni. Results indicate that both stakeholder groups found the innocent whistleblower more likeable and credible than the complicit whistleblower, while the fraternity/sorority respondents found the altruistic whistleblowers more likeable, credible, and legitimate, than their selfish counterparts. The article concludes with implications of the findings for whistleblowers, and limitations and directions for future research.

When Mars Hill Church came under fire for unethical activities, current and former parishioners began to share their stories of membership in and exit from the infamous mega church. In this study we explored the communicative space between the dominance of an organizational master narrative and the rise of a prevailing counter narrative, that is, the struggle for narrative ownership. Our thematic analysis of blogs featuring members' and leaders' stories and archival church documents revealed two tensions that members experienced in the struggle for narrative ownership: silence-voice and isolation-community. Ultimately, findings from this study extend Fisher's Narrative Paradigm, situating narrative fidelity and probability as most useful not for evaluating the epistemic quality of stories but for explaining their resonance with a particular audience.

The present study investigated students' eye gaze while reacting to dissenting peers in groups. We measured the duration of gaze toward a confederate who disagreed with either a prevailing idea around which the group was coalescing or the process by which the group was solving a problem. Results indicated that participants gazed at dissenting confederates longer than at confederates in control groups. Qualitative analysis suggested that participants seemed to use eye gaze to understand the confederate, to prompt the confederate to contribute to discussions, to ease tensions, and to process information relative to the group's task. Results provide an expanded look at how group members respond to dissenters, how conflict operates in some student groups, and how group members may differentiate acceptable and unacceptable disagreement.

Prior to its dissolution, Mars Hill, a former megachurch, developed a reputation for abuse and dictatorial control, creating an organizational environment from which many sought to exit. However, for those members desiring to leave, exit was far from straightforward. Our interpretive analysis of former members’ stories revealed tension as Mars Hill cast out members who wanted to stay ( involuntary exit) while pressuring those who wanted to leave ( involuntary staying). Former members used a form of faith-based reasoning ( spiritual rationality) to manage this tension. Finally, members described ways they simultaneously experienced identification and disidentification with the organization in the face of abuse and control, a phenomenon we characterize as uncoupled identification. We discuss these findings in light of the literature on employee-abusive organizations and identification.

Regardless of one’s religious views, churches represent an important and distinctive arena of study, in part because of their prevalence in society. There are more than 350,000 churches in America,...