Vol 43, No 2 (2024)

Measuring employee engagement is a popular means for contemporary organisations to assess employee commitment and engagement. It is evident from literature that a strong relationship exists between improved employee engagement levels and positive business outcomes. However, globally and in South Africa, employees tend not to be engaged, with non-managerial employees showing lower engagement compared to their managerial counterparts. From this perspective, disengagement, resulting in untapped employee potential, has significant financial implications.

Traditional employee engagement models list a positive communication climate as one of many job resources that contribute to improved engagement, alongside resources such as performance feedback, employee autonomy and opportunities for learning and development. Against this background, this research argues that a positive communication climate could possibly play a more expanded role in driving non-managerial employee engagement than is currently recognised.

Survey data were collected from four short-term insurance organisations in the South African financial sector. Data analysis was done using factor analysis and structural equation modeling. The results show a reasonable fit and support the notion that a positive communication climate may have an impact on all job resources, which could lead to higher levels of employee engagement among non-managerial staff.

The results show that communication climate may possibly be the foundation of job resource effectiveness. As such, management can address communication climate when seeking to improve engagement levels of non-managerial employees.

This study focuses on how fonts selected from different families have been used to test for disfluency. The motivation and standard for choosing a particular font for an experiment are not yet clearly defined from past studies. Drawing on methods in a systematic review of 10 articles published between 2007 and 2020, this article shows that authors prefer to use sans serif fonts in fluent conditions and serifs, scripts or handwritten fonts in disfluent conditions. In this study, disfluency manipulations were limited to reducing font sizes and percentages of grey or black. The largest size used was 56pt (fluent) and 18pt (disfluent) while the smallest was 12pt (fluent) and 10pt (disfluent). We observed that the opacity values of disfluent fonts ranged between 10% and 60%, making it unclear how disfluent a font can be. Apart from font sizes, fixation time, familiarity with materials and other controls influenced the results. This article reveals that a major gap still exists in research because of a lack of standard methods for determining the fonts used for testing subjects.

The study explored the proliferation and codification of discursive resources related to ambiguous arguments. This has led to a point of clarification. Marketing communication scholars have purposefully neglected the impact of ambiguous arguments, focusing instead on strategic clarity. As a result, there is a lack of conceptualisation and clarity surrounding this topic. Nonetheless, studies about ambiguous arguments are still nascent because of the overbearing criticisms that ambiguity hinders effective communication and persuasion. The study experimented to investigate the impact of ambiguous arguments on consumers’ purchase decisions and demonstrated that ambiguous arguments elicit favourable purchase decisions (participants (N=260): ambiguous 130 high and 130 low). The findings reveal that highly ambiguous arguments were rated significantly more with relevance, actuality, accuracy and comprehensiveness. In addition, individuals exposed to highly ambiguous argument advertisements elicited more favourable purchase decisions than those exposed to low ambiguous argument advertisements. The findings suggest that highly ambiguous arguments (ads) undoubtedly affect consumers’ purchase decisions because of the newness, complexity and irresolvable argument presented. The motivation could not predict the relationship between ambiguous arguments and consumers’ purchase decisions. The study tested some of the key predictions of the elaboration likelihood model and strategic ambiguity model with the cues; and discovered that individuals are persuaded by central or peripheral routes based on their capacity to elaborate. The implications and future studies concerning the current theoretical framework and verifiable findings on the impacts of ambiguous arguments are carefully discussed, based on the findings.

The widespread dissemination of fake news, “disinformation and misinformation”, is an ongoing issue that has garnered significant attention from scholars and media professionals due to its contribution to public distrust of the credibility of news provided by media outlets. This article explores Tanzanian journalists’ efforts to combat fake news by assessing their awareness, challenges and strategies. A quantitative approach was employed to gather data from a sample of 306 journalists from radio, television, newspapers and online/digital media across various parts of Tanzania’s mainland. Data collection was facilitated through a questionnaire that incorporated closed-ended and open-ended questions, distributed via Google Forms to various online journalists’ platforms, including WhatsApp and email groups. The findings indicate that an impressive 77.8% of these journalists possess a strong understanding of “fake news” and related concepts such as disinformation and misinformation. Over 70% of respondents encountered fake story sources in their daily journalistic pursuits, with the majority acknowledging its detrimental impact on media organisation credibility. The research also revealed a reliance on traditional methods by Tanzanian journalists to counter fake story sources used. Challenges were identified, including delayed responses from experts or government officials to validate the authenticity of a given story, pressure to report breaking news, a lack of fact-checking software, unreliable Internet connectivity for verifying facts online, and a shortage of trained journalists and news gatekeepers capable of identifying fake news sources.

The digital evolution and the adoption of technology have made it possible for information access and management to improve the social and economic impacts of the tourism sector globally. Technology has undoubtedly become the prime driver of modern e-commerce. This article examines the digital divide as a barrier to the adoption of technology by small, medium, and micro enterprises (SMMEs) in the agribusiness sector in the city of Tshwane, South Africa. The study adopted a quantitative approach and data were collected through a self-administered questionnaire. The data were subsequently analysed by using descriptive statistics. The relationships between variables were compared and interpretations were made. The results showed that a digital divide is hampering the adoption of technology by SMMEs in the agribusiness sector. The results further revealed that the high cost of technology/online platforms, limited funds and a lack of technical know-how are some of the obstacles faced by SMMEs in the adoption of information and communication technologies. However, the study also established that if these obstacles could be addressed, the benefits would be substantial. It is concluded that empirical work is required to investigate the extent to which SMMEs in South Africa are adapting to the challenges posed by the digital divide.

Indigenous African languages have often suffered neglect in health development campaigns until recently. Considering the multi-faceted effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on different peoples and societies worldwide, this article argues that vaccine campaigns in African settings cannot be impactful if they are not disseminated in the indigenous African languages. The article is hinged on Salawu’s model of indigenous language for development communication, which affirms the connection between language of communication and people’s understanding of the message communicated. The study employed a survey experimental research method. Using the pool sampling technique, both online and offline questionnaires were used to survey the opinions of 191 Nigerian and 114 South African respondents in Lagos and Mafikeng, respectively, about dominant indigenous languages used for COVID-19 vaccine messages, their degree of understanding vaccine messages and their acceptance or rejection of the vaccine messages. Interview sessions were conducted with five purposively selected health communication and media experts to determine the significance of and challenges encountered in the use of indigenous African languages for COVID-19 vaccine campaigns. The quantitative data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistical tools, such as frequency count and percentage, chi-square, percentile and logistic regression; while the qualitative data were thematically analysed. While respondents mostly identified with messages in Yoruba, Igbo, Setswana and isiZulu, a few respondents identified with a combination of languages, although these languages did not influence their acceptance of vaccines. 

This article investigates how South African political parties’ communication strategies influence voters’ decision-making. The study sought to understand the effects and influences of political communication approaches on voters’ decision-making processes. The election periods used for the analysis are the 1999 to 2019 general elections. The focus area of the study was Diepsloot, a densely populated township in the north of Johannesburg in Gauteng, South Africa. Furthermore, the researchers also assessed whether Diepsloot residents understood political communication, especially during an election period. The research focused on the African National Congress (ANC), the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). These parties were the top three when it came to electoral support in South Africa when this study was carried out. Data were gathered using open-ended telephonic interviews with voters in Diepsloot. While the study found that political communication affected a voter’s choice, it also revealed that a voter’s attitude towards these political communication interventions was one of caution. The article concludes that political communication is one of many discernible variables influencing voters when voting for a political party.

After 202 years (1822‒2024) of its inception in the then Gold Coast, now Ghana, and witnessing an unprecedented upsurge in publication since 1992, the circulation of print media appears unevenly distributed between the centre (capital) and the peripheries. Since there are not enough studies that explore the circulation of print media under Ghana’s fourth republic to show its circulation patterns, this article analyses print distribution figures and views sourced from newspaper firms to examine the situation within the participatory communication and the political economy of the media frameworks. It uncovers that a few newspaper firms have regional offices but do not print in those locations. They function only as bulk distribution and administrative centres that gather news to feed their headquarters in the capital. Ghana’s print industry operates a centre-periphery production and distribution framework. Furthermore, the study unveils that four factors contribute to newspaper concentration in urban centres, namely ownership tendencies, revenue motives, skilled labour availability and seat of government, and urban media credibility. Thus, Ghana experiences wide rural‒urban print disparities which retard timely information sourcing, consensus building and participatory development communication. The findings from the study have implications for Africa.