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More effective strategy communication?: Assessing multi-media communications in bridging interfaces

Research output: Contribution to conference - Without ISBN/ISSN Conference paperpeer-review

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Publication date08/2018
<mark>Original language</mark>English
Event2017 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management - Atlanta, United States
Duration: 4/08/20178/08/2017

Conference

Conference2017 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAtlanta
Period4/08/178/08/17

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.