Date of Conferral

2015

Degree

Doctor of Business Administration (D.B.A.)

School

Management

Advisor

Charlotte Carlstrom

Abstract

Managers spend 75% of their time actively communicating with employees. Effective leadership communication is fundamental to employee job satisfaction. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore how communication strategies that government agency leaders use may motivate greater employee job satisfaction. Twenty employees of a government office in Florida were the general population sample. The motivational language theory helped explore the nature of job satisfaction by focusing on leadership and employee communication strategies. Leadership communication influences employee motivation through incorporating 3 categories of utterances: empathetic (illocutionary) language, direction-giving (perlocutionary) language, and meaning-making (locutionary) language. The Van Manen selective approach helped code and the Stevick-Colaizzi-Keen method helped analyze the participants' transcribed face-to-face interviews. Member checks and data saturation ensured the findings trustworthiness. The findings developed from coding and analyzing data led to the discovery of 4 themes: empathetic language, direction-giving language, meaning-making language, and job satisfaction. The 2 most important themes, direction-giving language and meaning-making language, help motivate job satisfaction by explaining how leadership advice, clear instructions, and leadership stories pertaining to primary events from the agency's past provide direction and a feeling of job satisfaction. Social implications of this study include creating and improving organizational communication best practices and guidelines to help leaders communicate information effectively and to motivate regional governmental organization employee job satisfaction.

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