Active employee communication roles in the future: Voluntary no more?

In order to be successful in contemporary organizations, it is not enough for employees to engage in task-supporting communication. Increasingly, employees are also expected to contribute to the functioning of the organization as a whole: for example, by representing the organization in societal discourses, by scanning for environmental changes in norms or technology (Kim and Rhee, 2011), and by defending the organization when faced with criticism (Luoma-aho, 2015). This extended role definition challenges and complicates organizational communication for employees, and increases job demands considerably. While several active employee behaviors have received quite some attention, no typology for employee communication roles exists that is firmly grounded organizational-, corporate-, and strategic communication literature. This is unfortunate because many communication tasks are now shifting from the communication professionals to employees. This paper aims to improve our understanding of communication role expectations and role enactment in the future workspace