Promoting and adopting change is often a source of conflict in organisations. These conflicts are a result of perceptions held by the employees and managers. Employees may fear the uncertainties ahead, while managers may hesitate to take decisive action, or feel ill-equipped to implement the proposed changes. Additional factors, including the availability of resources (such as financial or staffing), may contribute to the conflict experienced during a period of transformation.

Such conflicts need to be managed professionally to ensure a positive outcome. This management process usually takes the form of negotiation, so both parties perceive there to be something to ‘win’ from the process. Recognition of the organisation’s culture – that is, awareness of understanding shared values, meanings and assumptions – can help managers communicate and enact changes.

This chapter explores navigating change, designing a change communication plan, acknowledging resistance to change, and recognising and managing conflict. It then looks at negotiation strategies to ensure conflict is managed appropriately.

Communication is an important professional and life skill. Organisations today are looking for people with the communication skills to contribute productively in the workplace and maintain effective relationships with their stakeholders. While we may all communicate, not all our communication is intended, and not all of it is interpreted and understood as we expect. Communication can break down at any number of points.

Your ability to develop messages that are received as they are intended depends on your emotional intelligence (being able to interpret which aspects of communication are required), your emotional competence (being able to manage emotions of yourself and others) and your technical skills (being able to produce messages that are capable of being understood).

It’s important that we learn how to harness the benefits of all the tools available to make us better communicators rather than let them replace us in our communication-focused roles. The purpose of this book is to help prepare you with the skills to improve or enhance your communication and effectively utilise the communication tools and channels at your fingertips.

Working collaboratively with others is inevitable in a business context. In larger organisations, the increasing complexity of business processes requires combinations of abilities and knowledge that a single person is unlikely to have. Even if one person could technically do everything, it would take too long.

As business operations and organisations have expanded globally, the spread of, and access to, expertise has increased. The expansion and global reach of organisations has created more complex tasks and decision-making that teams can help overcome. We are now seeing an increase in geographically dispersed and culturally diverse work groups that are connected via the digital communication technologies that make virtual group engagement and networking possible.

As most businesses aim for growth, the amount of work is increasing. Yet, time frames are shortening. Thus, collaborative activities, whether it be two people, larger groups or even multiple organisations, are a necessary feature of modern organisations. Collaboration will require you to draw on your active listening, emotional intelligence and relationship-building skills to ensure success.

This chapter establishes what it means to do discourse analysis. This is done by defining discourse analysis and providing examples of discourse. The chapter offers a practical overview of how the discourse in discourse analysis fits within the research process. The examples of discourse that are introduced in this chapter are grammar, actions and practices, identities, places and spaces, stories, ideologies, and social structures. After reading the chapter, readers will know what discourse analysis is; understand that there are many types of discourse; know that discourse is an object of study; and understand how an object of study fits within a research project.

The chapter establishes the role of context in an analysis. This is done by defining context, presenting a context continuum that can be used to understand an object of study, and introducing the types of conditions that shape understandings of discourse. Six different approaches to studying context are discussed in this chapter: systemic functional linguistics, the SPEAKING model, frames, indexicality, contextualization cues, and next-turn proof procedure. After reading this chapter, readers will understand what context is and why it is important; be able to study context using different models and constructs; and know how discourse and context work together to create meaning.