Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 091
Name the competing meanings
Organizations can appear aligned while competing discourses quietly assign different meanings to commitment, trust, loyalty, or professionalism
Premise
Leadership teams can use the same word and still inhabit different realities. “Commitment” may mean visible presence to one group and dependable delivery to another. “Care” may imply protection, candor, flexibility, or control. When these competing meanings remain hidden, executives may treat an argument over the relationship as resistance to a policy or failure to understand the message.
Relational Dialectics Theory, developed by Leslie A. Baxter and Barbara M. Montgomery, treats relational meaning as an ongoing struggle among discourses. Its mature form does not ask leaders to balance a universal list of opposite needs. It asks which systems of meaning are speaking, which have become authoritative, which are marginalized, and how communication constitutes the relationship itself.
What the model is: Relational Dialectics Theory in Knowledge →
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryTheories & Explanatory Models
- DomainConversation & Relationships
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Theories & Explanatory Models
Explains how or why a communication process works by relating mechanisms, conditions or variables. Its value is an account that can guide inquiry into what produces an outcome, rather than a name for the outcome alone.
- KnowledgeRelational Dialectics Theory