In search for communicative responsibility in the communicative organization

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept coworkers’ communicative responsibility taking and to test which factors might influence coworkers’ tendency to take communicative responsibility. The study is split into two phases where on exploratory phase consisted of an exploratory factor analysis on 2244 with the aim to find specific latent factors to test in the confirmatory phase. The confirmatory phase consisted of testing a proposed model through structural equation modeling on a dataset of 2482 cases. The results showed that internal communication climate and the view of top management are strong predictors of coworkers’ communicative responsibility-taking. The view on communication and the relationship with closest manager are also significant, although the relationship with closest manager had a very small effect. The study has theoretical implications since it contributes a concrete way to measure coworkers’ communicative responsibility-taking as well as suggesting factors important to take into consideration. The practical implications of the paper are that certain factors are important to work with in order to encourage communicative responsibility-taking, while other factors might not contribute as much.