Organizations disseminating health messages: the roles of organizational identification and HITs

Evidence-based recommendations for communicating the impacts of climate change on health

Climate change poses a multifaceted, complex, and existential threat to human health and well-being, but efforts to communicate these threats to the public lag behind what we know how to do in communication research. Effective communication about climate change's health risks can improve a wide variety of individual and population health-related outcomes by: (1) helping people better make the connection between climate change and health risks and (2) empowering them to act on that newfound knowledge and understanding. The aim of this manuscript is to highlight communication methods that have received empirical support for improving knowledge uptake and/or driving higher-quality decision making and healthier behaviors and to recommend how to apply them at the intersection of climate change and health. This expert consensus about effective communication methods can be used by healthcare professionals, decision makers, governments, the general public, and other stakeholders including sectors outside of health. In particular, we argue for the use of 11 theory-based, evidence-supported communication strategies and practices. These methods range from leveraging social networks to making careful choices about the use of language, narratives, emotions, visual images, and statistics. Message testing with appropriate groups is also key. When implemented properly, these approaches are likely to improve the outcomes of climate change and health communication efforts.

Dailey S, Zhu Y. Let’s work out: communication in workplace wellness programs

Purpose

People spend a lot of time communicating with their co-workers each day; however, research has yet to explore how colleagues influence each other’s health behaviors. The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between health-related communication and health behaviors among co-workers in a workplace wellness program.

Design/methodology/approach

Participants (n=169) were recruited from a large south-western university and its local school district through e-mail announcements sent from a wellness administrator. Participants were part of a workplace wellness program that offers several daily group fitness classes, as well as cooking classes, and other educational programs for faculty and staff.

Findings

Structural equation modeling was used to examine the association between people’s perceived social influence and social support from co-workers, organizational socialization and their health behaviors. Results indicated that perceived social influence from co-workers had an indirect effect on people’s health behaviors through their perceived social support from their co-workers, as well as through their organizational socialization.

Research limitations/implications

These variables were examined cross-sectionally, meaning that causal relationships and directionality cannot be determined in this study.

Practical implications

Co-worker communication and socialization appear to be important factors in understanding individuals’ health behaviors; thus, organizations that offer workplace wellness programs should provide opportunities for socialization and co-worker communication to facilitate employees’ healthy behaviors.

Originality/value

Although the authors only looked at one wellness program and did not examine these variables in programs of varying sizes and types, this study uniquely incorporates interpersonal and organizational communication perspectives in order to give new insight into co-workers’ health-related communication.

Communication in Organizations

This article focuses on the study of organizational communication, which is a dominant subarea of communication scholarship as recognized by the National Communication Association (NCA) and the International Communication Association (ICA). Because communication, and organizational communication as a subarea, is multiperspectival, this article first defines communication and then organizational communication. Next, the article describes the philosophical perspectives of organizational communication. The next section points to specific areas of individual-, dyadic-, group-, and organizational-level communication research in which communication and organizational psychology and organizational behavior (OPOB) share similar interests. The article concludes by describing practical implications of this area of scholarship (i.e., what can organizations and individuals do with the findings of organizational communication scholarship) and by identifying promising areas of organizational communication study.

Communicating Health at Work: Organizational Wellness Programs as Identity Bridges

With the growth in workplace health promotion (WHP) initiatives, organizations are asking employees to enact their personal health identities at work. To understand this prominent yet poorly understood phenomenon, we surveyed 204 employees at a company with a WHP program and found that participation in the wellness program mediated personal health and organizational identities. Results fill a gap in communication literature by demonstrating the effect of individual identity enactment on organizational identification and contribute to recent research stressing the relationship between identity and health behaviors. In addition, findings illuminate the role of situated activity in identity negotiation, suggesting that certain activities in organizations, like wellness programs, serve as identity bridges between personal and work-related identity targets.

Mothers "Google It Up:" Extending Communication Channel Behavior in Diffusion of Innovations Theory

This study employed qualitative methods, conducting 44 in-depth interviews with biological mothers of newborns to understand women's perceptions and use of new media, mass media, and interpersonal communication channels in relation to health issues. Findings contribute to theoretical and practical understandings of the role of communication channels in diffusion of innovations theory. In particular, this study provides a foundation for the use of qualitative research to advance applications of diffusion of innovations theory. Results suggest that participants resisted mass media portrayals of women's health. When faced with a health question, participants uniformly started with the Internet to "Google it up." Findings suggest new media comprise a new communication channel with new rules, serving the functions of both personal and impersonal influence. In particular, pregnancy and the postpartum period emerged as a time when campaign planners can access women in new ways online. As a result, campaign planners could benefit from introducing new ideas online and capitalizing on the strength of weak ties favored in new media. Results expand the innovativeness/needs paradox in diffusion of innovations theory by elaborating on the role of new media to reach underserved populations. These findings provide an opportunity to better understand patient information seeking through the lens of diffusion of innovations theory.

Boosting healthy heart employer-sponsored health dissemination efforts: identification and information-sharing intentions

Health information dissemination options have expanded to include workplaces and employer-sponsored efforts. This study focuses on a core relational concept found in workplaces, organizational identification-the feeling of belongingness-and the impact of partnering with employers and health clinics in health information dissemination. We use social-identity theory and multiple identification to test our predictions from a sample of working adults representing more than 100 different employers. We found that when people strongly identify with their employer, they have increased health behavioral intentions and they intend to talk about the health information with coworkers. The significant models explain more than 50% and 30% of the variance in these two outcomes. The experimental results examining single and multiple organizational sources revealed no differences on any outcomes. These findings offer a contribution to health information dissemination research by articulating how identification with an employer functions to affect behavioral intentions.