Angwin, Duncan Neil and Cummings, Stephen and Daellenbach, Urs (2018) More effective strategy communication?:Assessing multi-media communications in bridging interfaces. In: 2017 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, 2017-08-042017-08-08.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Organisational leaders need to reach out to a variety of stakeholders in order to convey their strategic intent. Bridging these interfaces is a challenge that focuses attention on how strategy may be communicated effectively. Many authors advocate developing and communicating strategy using multi-media forms that combine words and pictures. However, there is little evidence that multi-media communication of strategy is increasing in practice. This raises the question of whether multi-media communication is indeed better than single media for strategy communications. Drawing upon the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning we developed a series of hypotheses to find out, to what extent, and why, picture-plus-text presentation may provide greater benefits than text-only presentation in terms of 1) learning effectiveness, 2) perceptions of systematic integration, and 3) confidence building. To test whether multimedia strategy communications may provide more benefits than mono-media communications we ran an experiment across 8 countries involving 1,140 participants. Our results show there can be benefits to using multi-media means for strategy communications although there are performance variations that may determine when multi-media strategy communications are used in preference to mono-media means. These findings add to our understanding of the benefits and costs of multimedia strategy communications.