Resumo

Título do Artigo

Structure and Language: Effective Communication in Forming Consensus
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Palavras Chave

strategic management
communication
experiment

Área

Estratégia em Organizações

Tema

Abordagens sociais, organizacionais, cognitivas e históricas em Estratégia

Autores

Nome
1 - Kelly Cristiny Chinelato Sacramento
Faculdade de Economia, Administração e Contabilidade da Universidade de São Paulo - FEA - FEA - São Paulo
2 - Adalberto A. Fischmann
Faculdade de Economia, Administração e Contabilidade da Universidade de São Paulo - FEA - FEA

Reumo

Communicating strategic objectives is crucial for strategy execution. Since strategic planning is often restricted to senior leadership and implementation depends on all employees, there may be misalignment throughout the organization. Therefore, an assertive understanding of strategic objectives is the basis for forming a strategic consensus. However, although there is an emphasis on the positive impact that consensus has on the organization's performance, there is little evidence to attest which elements would stimulate it.
By relating elements of rhetoric and communication theory to the analysis of competitive strategy, this research proposes to understand “what is the influence of the use of different rhetorical structures and of image-based words in the formation of strategic consensus”. Thus, it is expected to identify cause and effect relationships between different elements of the internal communication of strategic objectives with employees.
By aiming to persuade the audience, Aristotelian rhetoric presents itself as an important theoretical framework to clarify the variables and relationships intrinsic to the quality of communication and the formation of strategic consensus. Three complementary elements compose rhetoric: the CEO is proxy for the qualified speaker (logos), image-based language provides the emotional appeals of the message (pathos) and the rhetoric structures are used for the construction of an argument (ethos).
This research aims to discuss the influence of rhetorical structures and image-based language on strategic consensus. Relating communication theory to competitive strategy, three cause-effect hypotheses were formulated and tested in a 3 × 2 online experiment, with 220 professionals from Brazil, simulating the communication of strategic objectives in a fictitious company. Analysis used Euclidean distance, ANOVA and post-hoc tests.
Three hypotheses were tested. The results obtained in the experiment corroborate the view that the quality of the rhetoric of leaders when communicating strategic objectives internally influences the formation of strategic consensus among employees. The joint analysis of the tested hypotheses provides evidence and indicates that both the rhetorical structure and the language used can contribute to clarify how such influence occurs.
By demonstrating that there is evidence that both the motivational rhetorical structure and the image-based language can promote greater strategic consensus in communicating strategic objectives to employees, this research proposes cause-and-effect relationships by variables at the individual level that impact the rhetoric of the leader and performance, as well as empirical insights into organizational conditions that provoke consensus. Based on the experiment carried out and the confirmation of the proposed hypotheses, a theoretical model of internal communication heuristics is proposed.
Stucki and Sager (2018); Desmidt and George (2016); Snow and Benford (1988); Overton (2018); Scott, Cavana and Cameron (2015); Hermann (1995); Epstein, Pacini, Denes-Raj and Heier (1996); Kahneman (2011); Carton and Lucas (2018); Carton, Murphy and Clark ( 2014).