When Does Positive Communication Maximize Effective Information Flow?

Abstract

Positive communication and its importance to organizations has become a popular topic of research among organizational scholars. However, there remains a paucity of work exploring nonlinearities in the role of positivity in communication effectiveness, with little research examining whether there can be too much of a good thing when it comes to communication positivity. To address these gaps in the literature on positive communication, I tested the hypothesis that work-related workplace communication will exhibit an inverted U-shaped curvilinear relationship with positive emotion. This relationship is hypothesized to result from a tradeoff between total workplace communication and the proportion of total workplace communication that is explicitly work-related as communication positivity increases. The results of this study generally support the hypothesized relationship and, save for some minor caveats, the hypothesized mechanisms underlying it. Enclosed are discussions on these caveats and the implications of this study’s findings for both organizational researchers and practitioners.