Work/Life Relationships and Communication Ethics: An Exploratory Examination

Abstract

Workplace relationships that transcend formal role boundaries offer benefits and challenges to organizations and relational participants. Communicative processes that form and maintain these relationships can be examined from a communication ethics perspective focused on the outcomes emerging from these relationships that define particular goods for personal and organizational life. The blended nature of these relationships makes them host to potentially competing goods tied to public and private concerns. Considering the connection of virtue approaches to communication ethics in organizational settings to the turn to positive approaches to communication and organizational theory reveals avenues for ethical reflection and action in these increasingly important relational forms.