A Study on Internal Communication factors as Determinant of Organizational Health : Evidence from Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam

Abstract

After the economic reform in the 1980s, the Vietnamese government began to restructure state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to accelerate private sectors and opened the market to facilitate commerce and foreign investment. As a result of this policy, the number of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has been increasing at a rapid pace for the last decade. On the downside, however, as Vietnam is deeply integrating into the global economy and the trend of globalization is on the rise, a wide range of multinational corporations (MNCs) have entered Vietnam to seek new business growth opportunities and to compete with local SMEs. This intensifying competition poses a threat to the overall performance of domestic SMEs. Meanwhile, there is little interest in organizational health in the field of communication.BRThis study is, therefore, to examine the important factors of internal communication which are related to organizational health of SMEs in Vietnam. The results indicate that workplace communication and goal alignment are two significant dimensions of organizational health of SMEs in the context of Vietnam while transformational leadership and employee well-being are unrelated to health of local SMEs. These findings would provide managerial implications to the top management of SMEs as well as contribute to the extant literature on organizational health within the domain of human resource management and communication research. Based on these findings, this study has given insightful recommendations to practitioners with a focus on enhancing the corporate communications and fostering the fit between employees and organizational goals besides improving the mental illness for employed staff.