Published on September 8, 2019

Volume 62, Number 3, September 2019 has just been published. A table of contents is provided below.

Integrative Literature Review:

Virtual Teams: Thematic Taxonomy, Constructs Model, and Future Research Directions, by A. Alaiad, Y. Alnsour, and M. Alsharo

The use, deployment, and growth of virtual teams have increased significantly in the past decade. This paper reports on a systematic examination of the literature on virtual teams to provide a thorough review, analysis, and synthesis of research. It examines theories, research problems, research focuses, research methodologies, and major findings of 149 related studies on virtual teams published between 2007 and 2018.

Research Articles:

Gender Effects in Student Technical and Scientific Writing—A Corpus-Based Study, by R. K. Boettger and S. Wulff

This study takes a corpus-linguistic approach to investigate gender effects in student technical and scientific writing. Specifically, it analyzes whether gender influenced how males and females used adverbs (e.g., very, really, definitely) and passive voice (e.g., The article was published in the journal). The overuse of both have been associated with poor writing clarity and concision.

The Effect of Leader Rapport-Management Feedback on Leader-Member Relationship Quality and Perceived Group Effectiveness in Student Teams, by K. S. Campbell and C. Lam

Preparing students to work on teams in the workplace is both important and challenging. This study explores the influence of team member feedback on leader rapport management, leader-member relationship quality, and perceived team effectiveness based on a feedback intervention that was delivered to team leaders within multi-disciplinary student teams in a technical writing course. 

Legitimating Negative Aspects in Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting: Evidence from China, by Y. Lin

This study investigates how large Chinese firms communicated occupational fatalities in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. The study compared reports issued by Fortune 500 Chinese firms with their reports of fatal occupational incidents to see whether the incidents were reported faithfully. An integrated analytical framework of legitimation strategies was applied to the analysis.

How Technology Support for Contextualization Affects Enterprise Social Media Use: A Media System Dependency Perspective, by X. Chen, S. Wei, C. Sun, and Y. Liu 

This study investigates how enterprise social media (ESM) support for contextualization affects employees’ dependency relations with ESM and the ways that dependency relations affect ESM use. Findings reported in this paper are based on a survey of 258 employees at a large Chinese software development company.

Teaching Case:

Writing in Transnational Workplaces: Teaching Strategies for Multilingual Engineers, by A. Hodges and L. Seawright

The authors, working at an international branch campus in the Middle East, wanted to revise their assignments in a technical writing course for engineers to better prepare students for workplace writing. Their students enter an increasingly diverse workplace, but instructors did not always adequately understand the needs of those transnational corporations. Semi-structured interviews conducted with students and alumni of the branch campus revealed the different perceptions of the two groups.