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The organisation and administration of research and teaching in universities depends upon daily consultation, cooperation and negotiation, shared management and input of specialist and organisational skills and expertise. Universities conduct staff surveys which reveal significant worries about certain person–management aspects of everyday university business activity and indicate areas where we can significantly improve management–staff interaction and communication. These data are supported by basic and well-rehearsed management thinking and expert advice from both the higher education and general management fields and by personal experience. Aspects of leadership responsibility and behaviour and the interaction between manager and managed are described in terms of management ‘manners’, focussing on the requirements for clear and open communication, fairness, transparency, management ‘modesty’ and emotional competence. The positive effect good manners have on staff are outlined and further areas for development/review suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite academia's best efforts there still remains a gap in communication skills desired by business practitioners and those delivered by new graduates. The authors suggest that this may be the result of practitioners demanding outcome-based skills and academia teaching basic non-business-specific fundamentals of communications. An examination of the literature suggested that outcome-motivated skills can be successfully taught, but that comprehensive outcome skills sets do not exist. Thus, the authors conducted a thorough review of the literature to identify those outcome-based communication skills that management experts, leadership theorists, business education professionals, communication skills researchers, and business development writers have stated are in greatest need in business organizations. They conclude with recommendations and implications for business management and education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Managing With Integrity preconference introduced different types of management theory and styles to attendees seeking answers to the questions of how to be an effective manager. Leonard and White were skilled facilitators. Leonard's background in reference services and White's in technical services enabled them to present a knowledgeable and balanced representation of management issues. Preconference attendees left with a folder of valuable notes, scenarios, and a bibliography to help them begin and continue to manage with integrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines new managerial discourses and practices in which the dialectic of labour is reconstructed as a series of acts of self-understanding, self-examination and "self-work", and through which the "self qua self" is constituted as the central object of management technologies. We interrogate concepts such as "excellence", "total quality", "performance", "knowledge", "play at work" and "wellness" in order to decipher the ways in which managerialism deploys what we term therapeutic habitus, and projects a new horizon of "human resourcefulness" as a store of unlimited potentialities. We invoke management's wider historical-cultural context to situate managerialism within the framework of modernity as a cultural epoch whose main characteristic is what we term "derecognition of finitude". It is the modern synthesis - with the "self" at the centre of its system of values - that provides the ground for current elaborations of subjectivity by managerialism. The paper examines how current vocabularies and practices in organizations use "work" to rearticulate discursively the human subject as an endless source of performativity by configuring work as the site of complex and continuous self-expression. Management thus acquires a new discursive outline: instead of appearing as an authoritarian instance forcing upon workers a series of limitations, it now presents itself as a therapeutic formula mediating self-expression by empowering individuals to work upon themselves to release their fully realized identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents findings on the link between leader motivating language (ML) use and worker intent to stay. Structural equation modeling indicated that ML use significantly improves worker intent to stay—with a 10% increase in ML leading to an approximate 5% increase in worker intent to stay. Also, analysis showed that the full ML model better describes the data than any partial model based on a subset of the ML components, and this outcome helps advance researchers' understanding of the ML theory. Results indicate that proper leader language use can substantially improve the critical organizational outcome of worker retention. As such, this study identifies potential new paths for requisite leader communication research, training, and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how perceptions of administrative support among 83 treatment staff working in a midwest prison system vary according to personal and work-related variables. It extends on previous literature by: (1) analyzing how perceptions of administrative support vary exclusively among prison treatment staff; (2) focusing on a single type of manager, the deputy warden overseeing treatment services, to avoid aggregation problems; and (3) adding new predictor variables to the study of perceptions of prison managers, such as education, danger, paperwork, and caseload. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression was utilized to analyze an eight-item scale measuring overall perceptions of administrative support among treatment staff. In addition, each of the eight items was analyzed separately using backward logistic regression. Our results indicate that demographic variables, particularly age and education, were better overall predictors of administrative support than work-related variables. Furthermore, the disaggregated analyses of the eight items suggest that different explanatory models are necessary for different dimensions of management support. This paper concludes with ideas for developing a theory on prison management/treatment staff relations and an outline to guide future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the postmodern and critical managerial communication and pedagogical literature, reflexivity has traditionally been conceptualized as an epistemological practice that emphasizes intellectual critique. Little attention has been given to how managers act reflexively in conversation with other organizational members. This study sampled managers who were trained from a communication perspective that emphasizes reflexive practice. The results suggest managers adopt a more relationally responsive approach to reflexivity within their conversational practice, which incorporates elements of intellectual critique. Three implications of a relationally responsive approach to reflexivity within managerial practice are highlighted: (1) reflexive practice should be viewed as a relational activity that highlights issues of situated judgment, timing, and rhythm within conversation, (2) reflexive practice emphasizes inclusive, respectful, and safe communication, and (3) reflexive practice is connected to empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Events at the Sunset Hotel illustrate the numerous human resources issues that can develop when a senior manager who was passed over for promotion distorts messages and undermines his supervisor's constructive change efforts. Rumors flourish, employees become confused, and Sunset Hotel's general manager is frustrated in his inability to accomplish goals. It is uncertain whether the general manager will be able to regain the senior manager's support or to prevent his behavior from affecting employee morale and damaging the hotel's image and reputation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Management has always been about communications. Business strategy in particular can only work, if implemented. Part of the process is communicating strategy to all company's stakeholders. The more team-orientated a management style the more communications becomes a key success factor. By the same token, there has never been a management discipline for communications in its own right comparable to all the others that have developed over time: Neither Marketing nor HR nor even Finance were part of the original settings as, for example, laid out by Erich Gutenberg in the 1960s. All these ‘subs’ were initiated by increasing specialisation of business administration and developed to mature disciplines. This article will argue for yet another management discipline, communications management. The reasons are mainly two/old: on the one hand there are increasing needs on different types of communications even without the world-wide web (such as financial communications), which must be integrated in one holistic approach. And on the other hand there are increasing new challenges caused by the digital economy (such as customer related communications), which will have to be integrated in an even advanced holistic management approach. This article will combine both reasons, but mainly focus on the first aspect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]