Active Employee Communication Roles in Organizations: A Framework for Understanding and Discussing Communication Role Expectations

ABSTRACT

Several scholars have pointed out the importance of employees’ strategic communication behaviors for organizational performance and employee wellbeing. Employees contribute to organizations by acting as brand ambassadors, boundary spanners and crisis communicators. Employees play such roles on top of assigned job tasks, which can lead to role overload, role conflicts and job stress. The analysis of employees’ communication role enactment is hampered by the lack of a framework describing the complete range of active communication roles that employees are expected to play in the workplace. This article introduces the Active Employee Communication Roles (AECR) Framework (AECR), develops the conceptualization of eight communication roles, and discusses implications for strategic communication. The first four roles – the embodier, promotor, defender, and relationship builder role – describe ambassador roles. In addition, employees play the roles of scout, sensemaker, innovator, and critic to contribute to organizational development. The AECR framework provides a new lens which aids our understanding of the relationship between communication, and employee performance and wellbeing, and provides employees and employers a tool to analyze and calibrate mutual expectations regarding communication behaviors. The framework can also help employees to more strategically allocate resources when executing the various communication roles. This may help to alleviate employee role stress, and create healthier workplaces.

Introduction

Organizations operate in increasingly dynamic environments in which media technology has heightened employees’ visibility both inside and outside the organization (Treem & Leonardi, 2013). Simply performing their jobs in a satisfactory manner is often not enough for employees to thrive at work (Thomson & Hecker, 2001): organizations expect employees to contribute to organizational performance and organizational wellbeing (Organ, 1997; Pekkala, 2020; Takeuchi et al., 2015) as active and strategic communicators (Heide & Simonsson, 2011). This means that the relationship between employer and employees changes, and employees are expected to play a number of communication roles at work in addition to doing their job.

The importance of communication for employee performance (Scudder & Guinan, 1989) is hardly questioned, yet the extended roles challenge and complicate organizational communication for employees. When employees have insufficient resources to deal with these role requirements, they experience role stress (Tarafdar et al., 2007). In addition, this extended set of roles makes it more difficult to understand what is expected of them, which results in role ambiguity (Rizzo et al., 1970). A typology of employee communication roles can help employees understand and solve such challenges. While Heide and Simonsson (2011) mentioned some active communication roles that employees may play in post-bureaucrtic organizations (e.g., dialogue partner and team member; see p. 205), the meaning and implication of such roles for strategic communication have not been developed. Employee roles such as employee advocate (Dawkins & Lewis, 2003; Men, 2014), boundary spanner (Korschun, 2015; Theofilou & Watson, 2014), knowledge broker (Leppälä, 2015; Leppälä & Espinosa, 2020), brand ambassador (Aaker, 2004; Heide & Simonsson, 2014), and innovator (Gode, 2019) have been proposed and defined. However, until recently, no overarching framework has described the spectrum of communication roles that employees may be expected to fulfill in the workplace in a more comprehensive manner. That is unfortunate, because the lack of a well defined framework for active communication roles hampers our understanding of the communicative challenges that employees face in post-bureaucratic organizations and the strategic significance of employees as communicators. Madsen and Verhoeven (2019) recently provided a framework to describe the shift of communication responsibilities from communication professionals to employees. From now on, we will refer to this framework as the Active Employee Communication Roles framework (AECR framework). Unfortunately, the roles that constitute this framework are not fully developed, and the implications of the AECR framework for strategic communication has not been discussed extensively. Role expectations are strong predictors of communicative behaviors and affect organizational performance (Lapinski & Rimal, 2005), and role stress and role ambiguity are very pressing challenges in today’s workplace.

The article will first explore the nature of the relationship between employer and employee, then discuss literature on active employee communication behaviors, role theory and communication roles and use literature relating to corporate, organizational, and management communication to further develop the active communication roles framework. After the presentation of the roles, we discuss the contribution that the AECR framework makes to strategic communication theory. Finally, the AECR framework is used to discuss how managers can establish healthy, realistic, and productive role expectations and prevent role-related problems.

Organizational identification, OCB, and role enactment

The relationship between employer and employee is a complex psychological phenomenon built around social exchange for the benefit of both parties (Sias & Duncan, 2019). Employees are psychologically attached to the organizations they work for (Ashforth & Mael, 1989). This attachment is expressed when they identify with the organization and engage in extra-role behavior (Sias & Duncan, 2019). Employees’ active communication behaviors are strategic, in the sense that employees use them purposefully (Mazzei, 2010). Employees can promote organizational aims (Hallahan et al., 2007), but their communication is also often aimed at obtaining personal gains, such as personal branding (Lee & Kim, 2020; Madsen & Verhoeven, 2016), the attainment of power and influence, and career advancement (Valentini, 2010). Employees can thus strive to increase their visibility, and distinguish themselves from competitors on the job market by undertaking extra-role communication activities. They can build up a strong personal profile when they promote the organization on social media, enhancing their personal network at the same time. Their communication becomes part of their personal branding strategy, and in this way, they can hope to improve their perceived value as employees (Madsen & Verhoeven, 2016).

However, often through active communication behaviors, employees aim to pursue organizational goals. This is particularly the case when employees have a strong psychological attachment to the organization (Mishra et al., 2014). According to social identity theory (Ashforth & Mael, 1989), social identification develops when an employee perceives that he or she belongs to a group, such as the members of an organization. People identify the strongest with entities that are attractive to them, because in those cases, group membership enhances their self-esteem (Smidts et al., 2001). Furthermore, the social exchange relation between employee and employer is enhanced when employees perceive that their managers are willing to support them and that information is adequately distributed throughout an organization (Walden & Kingsley Westerman, 2018). Organizational identification motivates employees to engage in activities that are beneficial for the organization and fulfill communication role expectations. Organizational goals become personal goals as well. For example, organizational identification motivates employees to protect the corporate reputation and defend their employer in the case of criticism (Ploeger & Bisel, 2013). Likewise, when their organizational affiliation is salient for them, employees are more likely to express the group identity, and strategically distribute work- and employer-related information to online audiences (Van Zoonen et al., 2014). To improve organizational identification, organizations implement internal marketing programs or introduce employee advocacy programs that encourage employees to perform an ambassador role on social media (Sonne et al., 2018). Besides such campaigns, face-to-face communication makes an important contribution to employee engagement (Mishra et al., 2014).

Active employee communication roles

Employees consciously and unconsciously play active and strategic communication roles (Heide et al., 2018; Zerfass et al., 2018), and in order to understand their communication behavior, theories about active employee communication behaviors, role theory and communication roles are discussed as a point of departure. After that, we develop the typology of eight specific employee communication roles.

Active employee communication behaviors

From a social constructivist or ‘communicative constitution of organizations’ (CCO) perspective, organizations emerge from organizational members’ interactions, language and sensemaking processes (Vásquez & Schoeneborn, 2018). From this perspective, employee communication behaviors do not only contribute to organizational performance, they constitute the organization. Through their active communication behaviors, employees ‘talk’ the social system of the organization ‘into existence’. This resonates with the growing acknowledgement in strategic communication that employees act as important active communicators rather than passive receivers (Heide et al., 2018) and that their communication could be “conceptualized as strategic communication” (Heide et al., 2018, p. 463). The CCO perspective thus places employees at the center of what organizations are and how they function (Heide & Simonsson, 2011).

Employees engage in active and strategic communication when they “actively seek, interpret and spread information and then engage in action” (Mazzei, 2010, p. 223), and when they “formulate messages, make critical interpretations, and influence colleagues, managers and customers” (Heide & Simonsson, 2011, p. 202). Mazzei et al. (2012) thus classified communicative actions into the categories of ‘search,’ ‘interpretation,’ and ‘sharing.’ Information is obtained from multiple sources, both within and outside of the organization, as well as information from both interpersonal communication channels and mass media (J.E. Grunig & Hunt, 1984). The situational theory of problem-solving distinguishes between active communication behaviors, such as information seeking, selecting, and sharing, and passive communication behaviors, such as information processing (Kim & J.E. Grunig, 2011). Such active communication behaviors can be proactive or reactive in nature, and as such, they initiate and allow interactions. Proactive employees “actively seek information and opportunities for improving things; they don’t passively wait for information and opportunities to come to them (Crant, 2000, p. 437), while in reactive communication, employees respond to some event or message that they did not initiate (Rafaeli & Sudweeks, 1997). Passive communication basically implies that employees refrain from communicative actions, and that they instead are “led, motivated, calmed down, informed and so forth” (Heide & Simonsson, 2011) by other actors. Employee roles that address passive communication behaviors are not included in the present framework. This article focusses on employees’ active rather than passive communication behaviors.

Role theory

Role theory is based on a dramaturgical metaphor and describes how people in their everyday activities ‘play their part’ in a performance: they act out different socially defined roles such as parent, nurse, citizen, and teacher (Turner, 2001) in front of an audience of friends, family, colleagues, clients and bystanders (Jian & Dalisay, 2015).

Role theory views an organization as a system of roles (Katz & Kahn, 1978). Organizations are formed when groups of individuals strive for goals that are beyond the reach of an individual (Van Vuuren, 2017). Tasks are broken down into sets of actions that can be managed by individual employees. Roles describe these sets of actions and make employees’ behaviors predictable. Roles are embedded in the context of the organizational social system. Employees can only play their roles, and organizational goals can be met, when others also contribute their part. As such, individual work performance is shaped by others in the system (Kahn et al., 1964).

This rather functional approach to employee roles defines a role as a normative rule, describing which behaviors are deemed appropriate and expected in a certain position, and which are not (Van Vuuren, 2017). Such role expectations form a script that guides the employee’s behavior. This script makes encounters predictable for all involved and enables organizations to deliver quality products and services in a reliable manner. Each role is learned through organizational socialization (Jablin, 2001) and is driven by different expectations determined by societal or organizational norms (Roberts & O’Reilly III, 1979). In contrast to a functional approach to roles, an interactional approach questions the existence of a script that prescribes roles prior to communication (Van Vuuren, 2017). Rather, an interactional approach to roles describes how a script (and behavioral patterns) emerges from employees’ improvised behaviors. A script is not static, but develops as people’s behaviors develop and people interact about the appropriateness of actions. As such, employees craft their own work roles (Tims & Bakker, 2010). Therefore, this article will also address the organizational dynamics that contribute to role expectations.

Every employee plays many roles simultaneously. For instance, a CEO usually plays the roles of figurehead, leader, liaison, monitor, disseminator, spokesperson, entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, and negotiator (Mintzberg, 1973). Belbin (1993) developed a very popular framework that described the roles that employees may play when they collaborate in teams. His nine-role framework includes the ‘resource investigator,’ ‘team worker,’ ‘coordinator,’ ‘plant,’ ‘monitor-evaluator,’ ‘specialist,’ ‘shaper,’ ‘implementer’ and ‘completer finisher.’ Although Belbin’s team roles touch on different communication roles in the workplace, they do not describe active communication behavior, or communication role expectations specifically. Belbin (1993) suggests that teams are most productive when all of the nine roles are represented. This implies that not all employees are equally skilled in all of the roles, and that employees have to supplement each other to create the most productive team. Likewise, it could be assumed that not all employees feel comfortable or skilled to perform all communication roles, and that some employees are more suited to play some roles than others.

Communication roles

Roles are particularly relevant for understanding employees’ active communication behaviors and Heide et al. (2018) argue for a need for “a stronger emphasis on communication roles” (p. 464), because through roles, organizations describe what behaviors are expected of their members (Dozier, 1992; Jian & Dalisay, 2015). Many of those expectations concern employees’ communication. In this article, employees’ communication role will be defined as a set of communication activities that an employee is expected to perform (cf. Jian & Dalisay, 2015; Kahn et al., 1964). While employee communication roles have barely been conceptualized, a good number of typologies have been developed to characterise the communication roles of communication professionals (e.g., Falkheimer et al., 2017, 2016; Heide & Simonsson, 2014; Schmeltz & Kjeldsen, 2019). Already in 1978, Broom and Smith distinguished the roles of expert prescriber, communication facilitator, problem-solver, and communication technician. Because the first three roles are closely related, they have since been collapsed into the ‘manager’ role (Dozier, 1992; Dozier & Broom, 1995). In crisis communication, Heide and Simonsson (2014) have distinguished between the roles of media expert, messenger, director, counsellor, pedagogue and facilitator (p. 141). Based on the European Communication Monitor (ECM), Falkheimer et al. (2016) distinguish the roles of strategic facilitator, business advisor, operational supporter and isolated expert. While these communication roles for communication professionals have been defined, conceptualized, and used in empirical research quite often, they do not describe the role expectations of ‘regular employees’.

Because organizations operate in dynamic environments, and organizational practices are always in transition, communication roles are never static. Employees have to deal with ever-changing role expectations. In order to be successful at their work, employees must be sensitive to the communication activities and communication styles that are expected of them, and how expectations regarding these evolve. As Gidden’s structuration theory proposes, individuals are not only affected by the social system in which they operate, their (communicative) actions also contribute to the development of these social structures (Giddens, 1979). According to the Montreal schools understanding of CCO (Vásquez & Schoeneborn, 2018), norms, unwritten rules and expectations of employees are constantly negotiated in interactions between organizational members. Taylor and Van Every (2000) distinguish between text and conversation, where texts are the shared understandings of norms and expectations in organizations while conversations are the interactions where these texts are being negotiated and made sense of. In the workplace, employees participate in these interactions continuously. For instance, they do so when casually commenting or joking about the appropriateness of the behaviors they observe. As such, employees themselves also contribute to the development of role expectations. However, management also contributes by implementing behavioral guidelines, providing feedback on behavior (e.g., in appraisal talks), and giving direct instructions.

In recent years, Falkheimer et al. (2016) found that the roles of communication professionals had transitioned from tactical roles as executors and producers of communications to more strategic roles as consultants and business supporters (Falkheimer et al., 2016). Rather than developing communication messages, writing press releases, or contacting external stakeholder themselves, communication professionals support employees to perform these roles. In line with this trend, this article proposes that employees increasingly act out (tactically) communication roles that were previously performed by communication professionals. For instance, while issues management has been developed in the context of public relations research (Heath & Palenchar, 2008) and always was considered the responsibility of communication and public relations professionals, now social media enable all employees to be involved in discourses about professional and societal issues (Madsen & Verhoeven, 2019). Although scholars acknowledge that there are “new demands on employee communication and practices and skills – not only in relation to their manager, but also in relation to their employer as ambassador” (Heide & Simonsson, 2011, p. 201), so far, very few scholars have explored, categorized, or described the many active communication roles that employees now play in the workplace and how they in this way directly or indirectly contribute to the organizations strategic communication.

Madsen and Verhoeven (2019) reviewed literature on active employee communication behaviors in organizational communication, public relations, corporate communication, strategic communication and related fields. On the basis of that overview, they developed the AECR framework which describes eight active communication roles (see Table 1). However, they did not describe the roles in detail or discuss the implications of such a framework for strategic communication in general, or employee role enactment in particular.

Table 1. A typology of employee communication roles (derived from Madsen & Verhoeven, 2019)

Communication role	Definition	Example of roles and concepts from the literature
The embodier	Displaying organizational characteristics and values by embodying organizational traits through their communication and behavior while doing their job	Brand ambassador, brand builder, organizational citizen behavior, ‘living the brand’, responsible corporate citizen
The promotor	Strengthening corporate reputation by communicating positive messages about the organization	Brand ambassador, brand builder, employee advocate
The defender	Defending the organization against bad news or criticism from external stakeholders	Faith-holder, brand defender, crisis communicator
The relationship builder	Initiating, maintaining and improving stakeholder relations	Boundary spanner, employer branding, CSR communicator, corporate employee volunteer
The scout	Gathering environmental information about organizational, societal and technological developments	Scouting, organizational listening, knowledge sharer, knowledge broker
The sensemaker	Organizing organizational and environmental information into comprehensible meanings/frames	Sense maker, narrator, storyteller, change agent
The innovator	Proactively coming up with new ideas and initiating organizational change	Entrepreneur, idea developer, innovator, cocreator, decision maker
The critic	Addressing shortcomings in the organization (either internally or externally), by raising their voice to upper management, colleagues, social media or the press	Whistleblowing, employee voice, dissenter, hate holder, moral work climate

The AECR framework: A typology of eight employee communication roles

Based on a review of literature in public relation, organizational, strategic, and crisis communication, the following section will define and develop the eight employee communication roles and discuss their purpose and meaning.

The embodier

The role of ‘embodier’ has been defined as “displaying organizational characteristics by embodying them through communication and behavior while doing their job” (Madsen & Verhoeven, 2019, p. 154). Through their everyday behaviors, employees ‘live the brand’ (Gotsi & Wilson, 2001; Ind, 2001). Particularly in corporate branding, organizational members are considered “walking-around embodiments or manifestations of the organization as a whole” (Christensen & Cornelissen, 2011, pp. 392–393). All employee behaviors that are visible to external stakeholders can be used to infer organizational identity, and, as such, enact organizational values. For example, an employee openly and honestly explaining why mistakes were made embodies the organizational value of transparency, while a mechanic who decides to visit the client for an extra non-required maintenance check embodies a value like reliability. One could argue that the embodiment of organizational values falls outside of the realm of communication, and should be considered organizational behavior. Still, this role is included in the framework because employees’ everyday behaviors provide signals of organizational values, and as such, these behaviors ‘communicate’ organizational characteristics to external as well as internal stakeholders. The role is mainly enacted by frontline employees in direct contact with customers or citizens, but every employee that interacts with external stakeholders on behalf of the organization plays this role. The idea springs out of the service industry. For instance, SAS (Scandinavian Airlines Services) gained competitive advantage in the 1990s by developing their services to cater for their customers’ needs in every way. The staff was empowered to provide a tailored service, and they became the representatives of the high quality provided by the airline. In other words, SAS understood that the behaviors and communication of employees was their most important asset (Gustafsson et al., 1999). More recently, several organizations make the employees part of their brand. “Joe and the Juice”, a juice and coffee bar with more than 300 locations in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, mainly hires handsome young men in tight t-shirts who add to the perception of the brand as young and trendy (Hansen, 2017). Likewise, the Singapore Airlines brand is embodied by the iconic ‘Singapore Girl.’ Singapore Airlines recruits and rigorously trains cabin crew to look and behave like her (Chong, 2007). The embodier communication role also has an internal dimension when employees in CSR literature are expected to act as “responsible corporate citizen[s]” (Mirvis, 2012, p. 93) and the employees’ behaviors are perceived as an extension of organizational identity (Andersen et al., 2017). This is seen with the rise of social media use. On such media, all employees play an embodiment role just by virtue of having the name of their workplace tagged to their social media profile, and the way they behave and communicate reflects on the image of the organization. In this context, all organizational members, even former employees (e.g., retirees; Gelb & Rangarajan, 2014), temporary workers and volunteers embody corporate identity and can act as brand ambassadors. The role springs out of employee identification with the organizations they work in (Ashforth & Mael, 1989), and that it is likely for them to perform organizational citizen behavior (OCB; Organ, 1997; Van Dyne et al., 1994). The embodier communication role is particularly enacted in offline or online encounters between employees and stakeholders, and the role has a theoretical base in fields such as corporate branding, corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication and organizational social media research.

The promotor

The promotor role has been conceptualized as “strengthening corporate reputation by communicating positive messages about the organization” (Madsen & Verhoeven, 2019, p. 154). Promoting is a form of ‘megaphoning’ (Kim & Rhee, 2011), and includes all “employees’ voluntary efforts to collect and circulate strategic information externally and internally” (p. 243). Externally, as well as internally, employees promote the brand in a trustworthy and reliable way (Pekkala & Luoma-aho, 2017; Snyder & Honig, 2016) in order to support the organization’s strategic aims. Employees can be an influential source as consumers and jobseekers trust postings from employees more than marketing campaigns (Snyder & Honig, 2016). Therefore, employees’ utterances on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn can benefit organizations. Van Zoonen et al. (2016) found that 36.5% of employees’ tweets related to their work in some way. Employees also use the more traditional ‘word of mouth,’ for instance, when promoting the organization as an employer (Keeling et al., 2013). Because of an agenda-setting effect (Carroll & McCombs, 2003), such positive information can improve corporate reputations, images, and hence public support and loyalty. Organizations strive to take advantage of the credibility and relationships of employees, while employees express and reinforce their professional identities. Interestingly, while these promoting behaviors may be motivated by a high level of organizational identification, the ‘external prestige’ that may result from these promoting behaviors, may in turn stimulate the identification process (Smidts et al., 2001). After all, people are tempted to identify more strongly with an entity (e.g., their employer) when affiliation with such a reputable entity boosts their self-esteem.

Whereas the embodier role addresses the communication behaviors through which employees express organizational values, the promotor role deals with positive communicative behaviors that aim to improve the reputation of the organization. The difference between these roles is that an embodier shows the organization’s virtues by acting consistently with them, while the promotor tells about these organizational virtues. The promotion role is often played out on social media and is addressed in literature on corporate branding, social media, and CSR communication.

The defender

The defender role has been defined as actively standing up for and “defending the organization against bad news or criticism from external stakeholders” (Madsen & Verhoeven, 2019, p. 154). Employees can participate in public discourses on professional and societal issues on behalf of the organization (Heath & Palenchar, 2008). These discourses take place on both traditional and new media, and are often initiated by external actors, such as activists, politicians, journalists, and consumers, which leaves the organization with little control over the media agenda (Vos et al., 2014). Communication and PR officials work to influence the agenda, but since employees usually feel involved with organizational issues and are well-informed, they often participate in these discourses as well (Madsen & Verhoeven, 2019). While these employees are not usually officially assigned a role as organizational spokespersons, they may still be viewed as representatives of the organization, because organizational members often communicate their affiliation in their biographies on social media. In the defender role, employees serve the strategic interests of the organization by presenting the organization’s perspective, by correcting misinformation (Lin et al., 2016), and by explaining organizational actions and decisions in the face of criticism.

The communication role has its basis in crisis communication literature predominantly, where employees are labelled ‘faithholders’ (Luoma-aho, 2015) or ‘brand defenders’ (Mazzei et al., 2012). Employees are considered the most believable ambassadors in crisis situations (Fearn-Banks, 2017; Johansen et al., 2012), and thus are better positioned to protect the image of the organization than the organization itself. The defender communication role is played on social media particularly, where defensive messages can potentially reach a large audience. However, employees also defend their employer in face-to-face meetings with friends and family. By providing an insiders’ perspective, explaining the rationale behind organizational decisions and behaviors, and correcting misinformation, employees may prevent a crisis from escalating further.

The first three roles (embodier, promotor, and defender) can all be considered ‘ambassador’ roles (Mazzei & Quaratino, 2017) or forms of employee advocacy (Men, 2014; Tsarenko et al., 2018). In these roles, employees strive to improve or protect external perceptions of the organization, i.e., corporate reputation or image. However, it is important to distinguish them conceptually because they refer to different (communicative) behaviors, and they may affect stakeholders in different ways. As a promotor and as a defender, the employee distributes information about the organization. While a promotor does so proactively, a defender responds to critical comments about the organization. In these roles, employees provide the public with informational beliefs about the organization (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). Regarding the formation of those beliefs, employees are a more trusted source than, for instance, journalists or CEOs (Edelman, 2018). However, in the embodier role, an employee shows or provides evidence of the characteristics of the organization through communication and behavior, which provides the public with descriptive beliefs (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). Such beliefs are based on first-hand experiences with the organization and are arguably a stronger predictor of behavior than informational beliefs (Doll & Ajzen, 1992). ‘Actions may speak louder than words’ when it comes to (consumer) loyalty (Cheung et al., 2014). For example, while a promotor would explain to publics that the organization is respectful towards their clients, an employee embodies such values by communicating or acting in a polite and respectful way.

The relationship builder

The relationship builder has been defined as “initiating, maintaining and improving stakeholder relationships” (Madsen & Verhoeven, 2019, p. 154). Employees in this role are also referred to as boundary spanners (Korschun, 2015; Levina & Vaast, 2005; Theofilou & Watson, 2014). Organizations operate in tight networks of relations, and organizations themselves are often also characterized as social networks (Tichy et al., 1979). Relationship quality includes, among other things, trust, control mutuality, satisfaction with the relationship partner, and commitment (Paine, 2003). Employees are increasingly central in these internal and external networks as they initiate and improve these relationships through their communicative behaviors (Ledingham, 2003; Mendoza et al., 2007). Employees can thus instill trust, bridge gaps between organizations and their environment, and develop lasting relations (Korschun, 2015) by listening to external stakeholders (Aggarwal et al., 2005), sharing information with them, or engaging in informal communication. Communication behaviors aimed at relationship-building include social bonding tactics (Wang et al., 2006). Such tactics involve staying in touch with contacts on a regular basis, personalizing the relationship by confiding in contacts, and demonstrating a cooperative, responsive attitude (Crosby et al., 1990). For example, customer relationship management (CRM) systems have been adopted in many organizations to assist employees in nurturing relations with customers (Soltani & Navimipour, 2016). Furthermore, a growing number of organizations engage in corporate and employee volunteering where employees do volunteer work during work hours to develop and build relationships with surrounding communities (Paull & Whitsed, 2018). These social bonding tactics create psychological ties, which create expectations of reciprocity, and improve relationship quality (Crosby et al., 1990). Such relationships provide organizations with access to financial resources (Hoffmann & Fieseler, 2012) and political influence (Ihlen, 2005). Internally, relationships among organizational members can stimulate innovation and ideation (Gode, 2019) and lead to a better work environment and identification with the organization (Bartels et al., 2019). Finally, relationships can provide the organization with access to knowledge. Some employees are more competent knowledge sharers than others. These “knowledge brokers” have the ability to bring people together, create new relationships and share ideas than can enable employees to perform their job better (Leppälä, 2015; Leppälä & Espinosa, 2020).

Relations are obviously at the heart of public relations (L.A. Grunig et al., 1992), yet (relationship) marketing and organizational communication also devote attention to employee communication behaviors that improve relationships.

The scout

The scout role has been defined as “gathering environmental information about organizational, societal, and technological development” (Madsen & Verhoeven, 2019, p. 154). Organizations usually operate in dynamic, complex environments. Environmental sensitivity is vital for organizational learning and survival. In particular, it is vital that organizational members are sensitive to signals in political, technological, societal, and business environments. While ‘environmental scanning’ has long been identified as part of the public relations role (Dozier, 1986), environmental listening and ‘scouting for information’ is becoming a responsibility for every organizational member (Kim & Rhee, 2011; Macnamara, 2014). The scout role encompasses a number of communication activities that contribute to the learning capacity of the organization (Barker & Camarata, 1998).

First, the employee gathers environmental information and insights from the environment of the organization. This can be the result of actively seeking information (cf., active communication behavior in the situational theory of publics; Grunig, 1997), defined as “the planned scanning of the environment for messages about a specified topic” (Clarke & Kline, 1974. p. 233). However, this also often concerns the serendipitous “unplanned discovery of a message” (Clarke & Kline, 1974, p. 233). For instance, employees may find out about environmental changes thanks to their social media use, informal meetings with professional contacts, or professional journals. They may also learn from complaints and problems they encounter in their interactions with clients. Such information enables the organization to manage problems and prevent crisis situations (Simonsson & Heide, 2018). Receptive employees may prevent ‘blind spots’ when employees inform managers of current developments. The communication role is also known as listening, and it involves a cognitive, behavioral and affective component (Lipetz et al., 2018). The cognitive component involves curiosity, interest, and perspective-taking. The behavioral component involves verbal and non-verbal behaviors that signal that the employee is listening, and the affective component includes, among other things, empathy. However, in this role, employees not only ‘listen’ to voices in the environment, but also share this knowledge and information within the organization (Lin, 2007). The communication role is played out both inside and outside of the organization, and has its theoretical base in public relations, knowledge management and crisis communication.

The sensemaker

The sensemaker role has been defined as “organizing organizational and environmental information into comprehensible meanings and frames” (Madsen & Verhoeven, 2019, p. 154). The organizational information environment is rather chaotic and ambiguous (Weick et al., 2005), especially in times of uncertainty such as during organizational change processes or crisis situations (Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010). As communication can be understood as a process of meaning creation (Rosengren, 1999), interpreting and framing the available information becomes a crucial activity for employees. Sensemaking in organizations is social in nature (Weick et al., 2005), meaning that employees create meaning and order by exchanging narratives. Employees turn chaotic, unorganized information into comprehensible frames that can be used for organizing. Through storytelling, employees experiment with alternative meanings and put them to the test (Boje, 1991). By introducing new interpretations, challenging the meanings put forward by other employees and spreading interpretations, employees help the organization by enacting certain ideas (Weick, 1995). In other words, through conversations and story exchanges, employees ‘talk the organization into being’ (Clifton, 2012): they construct organizational identities and structures through their communication. Organizations can facilitate these exchanges by offering platforms such as internal social media (Madsen & Verhoeven, 2016), or by organizing events such as townhall meetings to facilitate participative decision making. However, these exchanges may also occur in an unplanned way, through informal encounters. The sensemaking role emerges from literature on crisis communication, social media, organizational communication and organizational psychology.

The innovator

The innovator role has been defined as “proactively coming up with new ideas and initiating organizational change” (Madsen & Verhoeven, 2019, p. 154). It addresses the contribution of employees to the development of new ideas to improve products or solve organizational problems. For organizations to be competitive, they must be capable of continual improvement (Cochran, 2003). Continual improvement requires that all employees are involved in ongoing collaborative efforts to generate new knowledge in order to innovate and improve products, services and work processes (Batalden & Stoltz, 1993). In this respect, innovation is essentially a social process that involves a wide variety of communicative behaviors on the part of employees (Sonnenwald, 1996). Employee behaviors drive innovation (Linke & Zerfass, 2011), and Gode (2019) explored how employees can use internal social media as a platform for innovation. She found that employee contributions were not only valuable for the initial ideas they shared on internal social media, but also in the subsequent discussion and development of ideas when other employees started to interact with the ideas (Gode, 2019). This implies that innovation should be understood as the outcome of an interactional process, involving several actors, rather than the individual contribution of a creative employee. In the role of the innovator, employees not only propose new ideas and plans, but also respond to the plans and ideas of others in constructive and encouraging ways, and make suggestions for amendments of those plans. It is only when other organizational members interact with a new idea that it is developed further and turned into a plan that can be implemented in an effective manner (Gode, 2019). Through the scout and sensemaker roles, employees gain an understanding of how the technological, legal, societal, and media landscapes, in which the organization operates, changes. In the innovator role, employees contribute to the organization’s responses to these developments. The innovator role is rooted in organizational communication and is mentioned in literature on knowledge management, innovation and participation.

The critic

The critic role has been defined as when employees are involved in “addressing shortcomings in the organization (either internally or externally) by raising their voice to upper management or colleagues” (Madsen & Verhoeven, 2019, p. 154). In this role, employees are, in a way, acting as the conscience of the organization. By internally questioning organizational practices, employees can improve compliance with the moral obligations that are expected by society and have been put forward in CSR policies. They voice their opinions internally with the intention of putting ethical issues on the corporate agenda, initiating organizational change, and finally improving organizational practice (Morrison, 2011). However, when employees become aware of ethical misconduct in the organization or perceive that the organization is not taking the necessary steps to improve its practices, they might blow the whistle using external media as well (Near & Miceli, 2013). Their communication can create internal social media storms (Fägersten, 2015) and can even initiate a crisis if they reveal compromising information about the organization on public social media (Ravazzani & Mazzei, 2018). Criticizing organizational practices is also known as dissent when employees voice an opinion that deviates from commonly held beliefs in the organization. The outcome of dissent depends on the reactions from managers and other coworkers. Dissent is co-constructed in an interaction between the dissenter, managers and other coworkers (Garner, 2013). According to Garner (2017), a dissent event is both influenced by the perception of the dissenter and how previous dissent events were tackled in the organization. In this respect, organizational members (employees as well as managers) contribute to creating an ethical climate when they respond appropriately and support dissenting voices. Managers can especially encourage employees’ willingness to dissent when they openly acknowledge their expertise (Bisel & Adame, 2019). When dissenting voices are not appreciated in organizations, the critique might end up in other contexts such as social media. Employees can for example, criticize the organization and organizational issues anonymously on public social media, a behavior Ravazzani and Mazzei (2018) have termed ‘employee anonymous online dissent’ (EAOD), and that can be both an act of prosocial behavior or an act of revenge (Ravazzani & Mazzei, 2018). Ravazzani and Mazzei (2018) recommend that organizations take a proactive role by addressing issues raised by anonymous employees or developing internal systems or internal social media where employees can deliver their criticism. In this way, they perceive the role of the critic to be of value to the organization. The employer will expect the employees to act out this role as long as it benefits the organization, while society will expect them to speak up if they become aware of misconduct in the organization. The role is present in all types of organizational and corporate communication, and it is especially found in organizational psychology, crisis communication and social media.

Discussion

The discussion will first address the dynamic nature of employee role enactment, and how it challenges employees’ work performance and wellbeing. Then, the contributions of the framework for theorizing, analysing and managing role expectations are discussed. In this section, we will discuss how the framework extends our understanding of how employees contribute to strategic communication, explain how the framework can help employees communicate more strategically by first becoming more aware of the allocation of resources (time and effort, predominantly) to the eight communication roles, and then by helping them to allocate these resources more strategically. Finally, limitations of the framework are discussed, and conclusions are drawn.

The dynamic nature of role enactment

Considering the discretionary nature of active communication behaviors, one of the most important purposes of organizational communication is to create a communication climate that stimulates employees to contribute to organizational goals. However, harvesting the benefits of employee role enactment can be challenging because employees are relatively autonomous in their active communication behaviors. “Roles are improvised rather than scripted” (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002, p. 626). Attempts to promote active communication roles are likely to backfire if employees feel pressurized to perform such roles. In such circumstances, employees may feel inadequate because such encouragement can be interpreted as a signal that employees are currently not doing enough. Such a response may paralyze employees and they may become reluctant to engage in any active communication at all (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002). In post-bureaucratic organizations, employees are increasingly empowered (Heide & Simonsson, 2018), and through transformational leadership and organizational values, employees are expected to prioritize roles themselves and decide to ‘do the right thing’ (Christensen et al., 2015). Managers can enable and empower employees to perform the roles in a satisfactory manner (Mazzei, 2014), e.g., through training, by implementing tools that help employees perform these roles, or through encouragement. Mazzei (2014) suggest that managers can enable employees in their role-performance through seven enablement strategies, ranging from the promotion of two-way communication, the establishment of trust between employer and employee, and the statement of a mutual benefit.

Role expectations also emerge bottom-up, as employees give each other cues as to what is and what is not acceptable communication behavior (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002). Through this concertive control (Barker, 1993) employees set and reinforce norms. For instance, an ambitious, talented employee can contribute to organizational performance considerably by devoting much time and energy to actively engaging on social media. This activity may strengthen relationships with professional partners, and he or she may gather important information that may be used for strategy development. However, this behavior can unintentionally raise role expectations for others in the organization by setting an example. Others may infer that they are expected to do the same. In this sense, role stress not only emerges from managerial practices, but also from the expectations that employees, often unintentionally, signal towards their peers. This can even lead to an organizational culture in which employee performance is ‘never enough,’ and organizational citizenship becomes more of an obligation (Van Dyne & Ellis, 2004). Employees are particularly vulnerable to such “job creep” and role expansion when they have great relationships with their managers (Sias & Duncan, 2019).

Our framework illustrates the diversity of the communication roles that employees may play, and highlights the wide range of communication competencies that may be required from them even though they may not even have received communication training to perform these tasks. With limited resources, employees are forced to prioritize some communication roles over others. Employees are likely to priotize roles on the basis of the amount and strength of relations tied to the role (Sluss et al., 2011). Furthermore, role salience may depend on situational factors such as accessibility or normative and comparative fit (Sluss et al., 2011). This suggests that employees may not usually be very strategic when it come to prioritizing one communication role over the other. Below, we will explain how the presented framework can contribute to the field of strategic communication and how it may help employees become more strategic.

Contributions of the AECR framework

Strategic employee communication is not only a matter of “gaining support for corporate changes or new organizational practices” (Aggerholm & Thomsen, 2016, p. 196). Rather, in post-bureaucratic organizations, employees are expected to play a more active role that includes a broader range of communication activities (Heide & Simonsson, 2011). Strategic communication “encompasses all communication that is substantial for the survival and sustained success of an entity.” (Zerfass et al., 2018, p. 493). This expanded role conception illustrates how strategic communication in post-bureaucratic organizations is a responsibility shared by all employees (Andersson, 2019b; Heide et al., 2018). However, employees not only contribute to organizational goal attainment, but their communicative behaviors are also aimed at obtaining personal career goals. Regardless, role theory provides a particularly useful lens on strategic communication because role expectations are not only shaped through internal communication (Walden, 2019), but employees’ communicative behaviors are also shaped through role expectations regarding appropriate and in appropriate communication behaviors. The AECR framework describes the specific communication roles that employees may fulfill in order to contribute to organizational survival, and – performance.

First, employees help the organization manage the stakeholders in its’ environment by playing the roles of embodier, promotor, defender, and relationship builder. These roles are often collapsed under the term ‘ambassador’, but they involve distinct communication activities that may all contribute to the reputation of the organization as well as the trust that stakeholders put in the organization. For instance, employees that embody the organizational identity may generate organizational trust because they ‘walk the walk’ and make identity expressions more authentic. In the defender role, employees may successfully convince the public of the merit of the organizational behavior, and as such, they may narrow the gap between the issue positions of the organization and the publics (S. Kim & Krishna, 2017).

Second, “ … all organizational members negotiate meanings and make the organization operate” (Mazzei et al., 2012, p. 34; Weick, 1977). As the CCO perspective suggests, organizations are constituted through the communication of employees (Cooren et al., 2011; Vásquez & Schoeneborn, 2018). With more fluid organizational change, employees develop the organization bottom-up. The AECR framework provides us with an insight into the contributions that employees conscious or unconsciously make to the organizational change, through the enactment of different communication roles. First, through the scout role, employees can put issues on the corporate agenda that may lead to organizational change. Then, in the sensemaker role, employees engage in dialogues that may lead to a shared understanding of the importance and meaning of the issue for the organization. This may inspire employees to play the critic role, and challenge current organizational behaviors. Finally, through the innovator role, employees may contribute to concrete proposals. As such, through the roles of information scout, sensemaking, innovator, and critic, employees contribute to organizing. For instance, such decentralized strategic communication efforts help organizations keep up with the digital revolution (Knebel & Seele, 2019).

Apart from contributing to understand the role of employees in strategic communication, we propose that the AECR framework can be used to analyze and manage communication roles in organizations. We first explore the use of the framework for the sake of analysis, and then move the discussion to issues of employee self-management and the management of role expectations.

First, the AECR framework helps employees and managers to analyze role expectations both on the level of the individual employee and on an organizational or departmental level. We propose that the AECR framework can help employees reflect on the way in which they allocate their resources (time and energy, predominantly) to the various communication roles, which may help them to reassess these choices to become more strategic and effective communicators. At the same time, from the perspective that organizations can be viewed as a system of roles (Katz & Kahn, 1978), a group of employees (either a project team, temporary work group, department, or small organization), can use the framework to assess whether the roles that members play are sufficiently complementary. In order to thrive, a group needs to be sensitive to developments in its environment, make sense of environmental information, be able to innovate, bridge the environment by developing strong relations with partners in that environment, manage impressions in that environment, while at the same time remain critical towards its own performance. In other words, we propose that any team can only be truly effective if each of the roles are performed by at least some members, to some extent, in the same way as it is a requirement in Belbin’s model that there are different roles in a team. Conversely, if none of the team members fulfill one of the roles (e.g., defender role), problems are bound to occur (e.g., vulnerability to reputational damage in case of crisis and criticism). As such, the AECR framework may help teams to assess and improve the ‘communicative vitality’ of a team. Although not all roles are always needed to the same extent, the framework makes it possible to check whether enough members play each of these roles. For example, if a team tolerates unethical work behaviors, one may question whether enough team members play the critic role. When a team is inwardly oriented, it is unlikely that enough members play the roles of scout, promotor or defender.

Second, the AECR framework can assist in the management of role expectations. Supervisors can contribute to a healthy, constructive communication climate by downplaying role expectations when they become unrealistic, stressful and unproductive. Through concertive control, employees often unintentionally raise behavioral standards in an organization, and as such, contribute to an ‘iron cage’ (Barker, 1993). Employees may better recognize dysfunctional role expectations and more strategically craft a communication role for themselves that, on the one hand, helps to achieve organizational goals, while, on the other hand, fits personal identity, ambition and skills. As role expectations emerge from narrative processes (Van Vuuren, 2017), the management of role expectations also requires communicative interventions. In particular, we propose that the AECR framework facilitates meta-communication, which can “increase organization members’ understanding and thereby facilitate a more reflexive and broader approach” (Heide & Simonsson, 2015, p. 223). Meta-communication can help clarify role ambiguities and negotiate between role requirements. It may also encourage employers and employees to make expectations more explicit: employees and supervisors (or peers in self-managing teams) can discuss to what extent and how employees are expected to perform each of the eight roles. Such communication can help employees manage role requirements, invest resources such as time and effort in an effective way, and prevent role overload.

Limitations

While the framework can help organizations establish healthy, productive role expectations, it is obviously not without its limitations. First, this list of roles may not be exhaustive. In particular, the framework only addresses active communication roles, leaving out passive roles. One such role could be a consenter. In line with “the spiral of silence” (Noelle‐Neumann, 1974), an employee who plays this role refrains from challenging organizational or managerial decisions or misconduct conducted by another coworker in order to avoid problems or become isolated from the group.

Second, while role stressors constitute quite a pressing problem for employees in post-bureaucratic organizations (Rosen et al., 2010), it may not be such a prevalent problem for employees in jobs that are less knowledge-intensive. Many jobs may have pretty straightforward and relatively well-defined job requirements (e.g., cashier, mail delivery, assembly line work, or processing orders in a warehouse). However, employees in service roles or manufacturing are also often encouraged to contribute in a promotor role, or provide suggestions for innovating procedures.

More research is needed to understand how employees experience and cope with these communication roles. They may make their jobs more interesting, as they contribute to skill variety and they may make their work more meaningful, but employees may also feel uncomfortable playing (some of) these roles, and may feel overwhelmed by the number of role expectations. Future research should explore to what extent role-related problems emerge from communication roles in the same way as Andersson (2019a) found that playing an ambassador role can result in identity-tension.

Conclusion

The Active Employee Communication Roles (AECR) Framework with eight active employee communication roles was introduced to shed light on the increasing expectation that employees are strategic communicators in organizational contexts. These roles are often perceived as extra-role behavior (Men, 2014), and are often motivated by employee organizational identification (Ashforth & Mael, 1989). Role expectations can raise a number of challenges for employees: (1) employees are not always trained and able to perform the required communication activities properly; (2) they may not be engaged or motivated to do so – as proposed in the self-determination theory, meeting expectations (i.e., extrinsic motivation) may, in fact, harm autonomous motivation (Vansteenkiste et al., 2006); and (3) communication role expectations may cause role stress and role ambiguity. Employees may feel that their communicative efforts are ‘never enough’. It is therefore a balancing act for managers to encourage employees to act as strategic communicators, while making sure that the employees have sufficient resources (i.e., time, support, skills) to cope with those demands. The proposed framework can help managers and employees to improve role clarity by making expectations regarding employee communication explicit, and help employees obtain the resources to communicate more efficiently and more strategically. Furthermore, the framework contributes to the understanding of how employees active communication behavior contributes to strategic communication by acting out the different communication roles.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).