Negotiating Workplace Relationships

Teaches students how to navigate the ethically challenging and professionally risky situations they are likely to encounter in their working lives. Grounded in both classic and contemporary studies, this narrative-based text introduces a theoretical framework and pragmatic communication strategies for mitigating personal risk and optimizing relational and organisational outcomes.

Negotiating Workplace Relationships teaches students how to navigate the ethically challenging and professionally risky situations they are likely to encounter in their working lives. Grounded in both classic and contemporary studies, this narrative-based text introduces a theoretical framework and pragmatic communication strategies for mitigating personal risk and optimizing relational and organizational outcomes. Throughout the text, students learn how power differences, normative pressures, performance obligations, and other social, relational, and ethical factors complicate workplace encounters. Each chapter features real-world scenarios that illustrate unique challenges such as proposing innovations, responding to harassment, managing workplace romance, offering criticism, and dealing with difference. Students are provided with current research on each communicative challenge, then explore possible responses using the Risk Negotiation Cycle. Featuring vivid examples that encourage critical thinking and lively discussion on the topic of communication in the workplace, Negotiating Workplace Relationships is well-suited to courses in organizational communication, work relationships, leadership communication, organizational ethics, applied communication, and management.