Will you speak up, digitally? A high-context communication perspective

Communication technologies allow employees to express work-related ideas, concerns, suggestions, and opinions digitally, from anywhere and at any time, without context. However, for employees accustomed to high-context communication, loss of context equates to losing guideposts to their usual communication practices. This leads us to examine high-context communicators’ concerns about and strategies for digital voice. Results of an inductive qualitative study with 43 workers from a high-context Chinese culture suggest that high-context communicators often struggle with digital voice because it imperfectly provides the context needed to guide their usual high-context communication. Given these concerns, high-context communicators develop five self-censorship strategies to accommodate their digital voice. High-context communicators may opt to not express digital voice at all or to express digital voice with diplomatic language so that the expressed digital voice is carefully crafted to be relationally noncontroversial, linguistically terse, or associatively vague. Findings suggest that digital voice is mentally taxing for high-context communicators while documenting the interplay of employee voice, communication technology, and culturally bound communication norms.