ABSTRACT
After one’s family, the workplace stands at the center of most adults’ lives. We spend half our waking hours each day in the presence of others with whom we share a tangle of social relationships. Just as one cannot choose one’s family, most of us have no control over who our supervisors or our coworkers are. Nonetheless, we are expected to maintain harmonious relationships with others, even with those who may be competitors for advancement or resources. In other cases, we attempt to foster closer relationships with coworkers we happen to like. It is also the case that relationships between employees can change as their institutional roles change. The workplace, therefore, can be characterized as a complex social milieu in which actors pursue a multitude of diverse agendas, and even innocent or well-meaning statements may be scrutinized by their recipients for subtext or multiple messages. These issues are exacerbated in computer-mediated communication (e.g., e-mail and social media), which typically lacks the contextual cues of face-to-face interaction. Given all of this, it is easy to see how workplace communication can lead to miscommunication.
