Exploring Strategic Communication Practitioners’ Lived Experiences in Navigating Organizational Constraints and Building Trust
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Abstract
Strategic communication plays a critical role in shaping organizational relationships and influencing public perception within complex sociocultural contexts. Within this field, understanding practitioners’ lived experiences offers valuable insights into how meaning is constructed and enacted in professional practice. However, little is known about the subjective and interpretative dimensions of strategic communication work, raising the question of how practitioners navigate organizational constraints, build relational trust, and manage emotional labor in their daily roles. Using an interpretative phenomenological approach, this study explores the essence of these experiences and reveals how they inform professional practice. Data were collected over a period of six weeks through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with twelve purposively selected strategic communication practitioners from diverse organizational settings, and analyzed using thematic clustering to identify core experiential patterns. The findings highlight three interrelated themes: adaptive framing of messages to balance institutional directives with audience needs, cultivation of trust through culturally attuned engagement, and the emotional labor involved in sustaining constructive communication under high-stakes conditions. These findings have significant implications for practice, emphasizing the need for organizations to design training programs that strengthen practitioners’ relational sensitivity, intercultural awareness, and emotional resilience in communication management. By reframing communication as a meaning-centered process, this study advances our understanding of the field and offers a foundation for future research to examine these experiential dimensions across varied cultural and organizational contexts.
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