The Strategic Use of Media in Organizations: A Leadership Perspective

For some time, there has been a call to integrate various perspectives on media use in organizational setting (Trevino, Webster, & Stein, 2000). In particular, the perspectives represented by the technology adoption... [ view full abstract ]

For some time, there has been a call to integrate various perspectives on media use in organizational setting (Trevino, Webster, & Stein, 2000). In particular, the perspectives represented by the technology adoption literature, the social presence and media richness literature, and the social-psychological literature on media selection. The social psychological perspective emphasizes social context and personal preferences that pre-date specific media choice decisions, the social presence and media richness perspective focus on the characteristics of media in making specific choices, and the technology adoption literature focuses on how technologies get added and dropped from media repertoires in general. In
addition, the field has only recently started to explore the issue of more complex media strategies which tend to be leaders’ most important communication tasks. This article provides a model that integrates the three approaches, as well as the new media succession theories that have been introduced in the last few years.