The Effect of High-Impact Writing on Decision Making Within a Public Sector Bureaucracy

Abstract

Writing within organizations is generally a purposeful, goal-oriented activity (Gieselman, 1982). When generating documents, organizational writers usually wish to achieve specific outcomes, such as increasing readers' knowledge to improve their performance of tasks, disseminating information so organizational members can make informed decisions, persuading decision makers to approve a particular course of action, or building rapport and gaining trust. These outcomes are affected by readers' interpretations of a document's linguistic, intra-textual cues. In turn, these interpretations may be steered by readers' constructions of their organizational environments. This reader-text-environment interaction generates a context that influences how readers process documents to complete tasks and achieve personal and organizational goals. Rogers and Brown (1993) and Smeltzer and Thomas (1994) observe that there is a paucity of research conducted within complex organizational settings that directly investigates the relationship between writing style and readers' relative abilities to comprehend and use information to complete complex organizational tasks. This study, conducted in a medium-size federal government agency, examines whether readers interpreting reports written in what Fielden and Dulek (1987, 1990) call a high-impact (HI) style - a style that communication researchers claim reflects effective writing- make better decisions than readers interpreting the same report written in a bureaucratic, low-impact (LI) style that is the organization's norm. To understand these readers' report interpretation processes, their decisions, and their attitude toward the HI and LI reports, this research examines organizational context factors: perceived work roles, job design, organizational structure, report genre expectations, and organizational language norms. In particular, the study focuses on how readers working in an organization with well-established language norms react to and assess reports that differ significantly from those norms in organization, style, and document design - resulting in what Rorty (1989) and Bruffee (1984) call organizational discourse. Although the HI reports are theoretically easier to understand, this new, abnormal discourse may challenge organizational knowledge about what an effective report is and deflect attention from interpretation and analysis of report content, thus affecting readers' assessments of the report. Literature Review As Rogers and Brown (1993) and Smeltzer and Thomas (1994) have pointed out, limited research exists on the relationship between writing style and organizational effectiveness as defined by reader-based, organizationally specific outcome measures. Both practical and epistemological factors account for this paucity of research. First, doing research within complex organizational settings is time-consuming, an important consideration for junior faculty who must produce a significant number of articles to please tenure committees and review boards. Another practical problem is that gaining access to organizations can be difficult, particularly for researchers in departments that lack close ties to the business community. Furthermore, the research methods this work often requires - for example, participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and protocol analysis - themselves require substantial organizational support to gather, transcribe, code, and analyze data. Second, and more importantly, many business communication researchers, still influenced (often tacitly) by the Shannon-Weaver communication model and its many outgrowths, unwittingly continue to locate the source of writing effectiveness in the document itself or readers' reactions to the document rather than in the complex interplay of document, reader, and the organizational context that strongly influences readers' interpretive practices. Researchers' continued use of readability formulas to evaluate document effectiveness indicates the dominance of this tacit mental model that the document is the locus of effective writing and that a metric can be used to determine if the document is comprehensible and useable (Campbell & Hollmann, 1985; Courtis, 1987; Haar & Kossack, 1990; Heath & Phelps, 1984; Schroeder & Gibson, 1990). …