Management Communication: History, Distinctiveness, and Core Content

Management communication is the study of managers’ stewardship of writing and speaking to get work done with and through people. This paper overviews the field of management communication, its history, distinctiveness from other professional communication fields, and its content. The diversity of management communication training across the Financial Times’ top twenty MBA schools and of the theories influencing award-winning researchers’ work prompted a search for fundamental constructs. These training and researcher data, coupled with a review of the field’s most read journals and literature on the nature of managerial work, suggested a place to begin. Five core management communication activities are proposed: predicting audience response, selecting workplace language, seeing and shaping organizational genres, diagnosing communication effectiveness, and using discourse interaction.