Computer mediated communication in a context of modern organization: a scoping review

Purpose - The present article aims to reveal and summarize key points of the application of information and communication technology (ICT) and Internet technology in the context of modern organization communication, related management processes. Design/methodology/approach - methods of meta-analysis, comparative analysis and systemizing-synthesis are used in this article. A scoping review methodology was chosen as dominant for the research with the purpose of assessing key points in the context of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) usage in modern organizations. The research is based on a qualitative paradigm. Findings – Results of the scoping review suggest that ICT and CMC are compatible and can be successfully applicable to solve the main challenges in management and control contexts of inter-organizational, organizational, group (team) and inter-personal communication and related processes. In addition, this new combination of management methods and technological innovations has a great impact on opinion and behavior of customers and overall society, process improvement in business organizations, and change management. Research limitations/implications - Firstly, a limited scope of organizations especially in Public and Non-governmental sector use CMC in everyday duties. Nevertheless, a usage of ICT and CMC requires not only the understanding of the theoretical background but also strict practical implication guidelines as well as measurement and evaluation indicators, targets, and an overall model for analyzing. Since this article is based on the scoping review where main findings and conclusions are outlined from a meta-analysis, case studies and comparative analysis towards a practical implication are not sufficiently elaborated. The second limitation which can also be called a future implication might be a wide scope and content of the CMC concept as well as the dynamics of the communication process in organizations, increasing demand from business organizations. Practical implications -The research may serve as a starting point to a further scientific discussion regarding the usage ICT and CMC both separately and as a part of other hybrid project and process methods, optimization and continuous improvement of communication, learning, control and other related processes and systems in organization management. Originality/Value - The main value of the presented article can be described as underlying spheres where CMC has the major impact in management of modern organizations: it takes effect in a wide field of internal and external processes as well as in overall process optimization activities and change management. Keywords: Computer Mediated Communication (CMC); organization management; information and communication technology (ICT); Human Resource Management (HRM); leadership; technostress; online learning. Research type: literature review. JEL classification: M15- IT Management, D83 - Information and Knowledge, Communication.


Introduction
In contemporary organizations and business processes, communication without Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is unimaginable. Researchers, investigating the problems of organizational communication, concentrate on the effectiveness of Computer-Mediated Communication and Digital Communication which have become very significant in network-internet powered society. ICT is the exchange of the information, forming new practices of communication and decision making. Social media also engages in social networking when communicating with individual professional or general interest groups (Priante et al., 2017). Alongside the strengths that the digital mode of communication clearly has, i.e., well-timed and faster transfer of information (Collyer, 2017), change management and decision making, faster response to the problem and feedback (Akan et al., 2016), scientists also discuss other aspects of CMC. One of the most important is the need to communicate different than before, as global and dynamic business environments, the transition to a network organization structure, and the introduction of the Z generation into the labor market require new answers on how to maintain an effective interaction between organizations, groups and individuals. Based on the research, scientists provide reasonable suggestions for overcoming the challenges of modern organizations of communication and social challenges (social integration, education). However, the insights to the scientific literature summarizing recent research are relatively rare, making it difficult for practitioners in organizations to make use of researchers' observations. Filling in this gap, the aim of the article is to examine recent scientific publications in which the concept of CMC is analyzed in relation to the activities of organizations, and to highlight issues that lead to a better understanding of topical issues.
This scoping review, based on methodological access, is intended for practitioners interested in cutting-edge research on the application of ICT in the field of communication in organizations as well as researchers conducting research on related topics such as organizational behavior, other related research areas.
Due to the nature of investigation, the article is not presenting pure theoretical background, instead it immediately presents the methodological part where a general overview of recent scientific research is conducted. Following is the part of the research results. At the end of the article, key conclusions are formulated.

Research methodology
Research methodology of the present article is based on the scoping review and is implemented in accordance to the suggested framework by Arksey and O'Malley (Peterson, 2016). The usage of this method leads to a qualified and proper meta-analysis and synthesis of the main evidence in the context of CMC implication in the management process of modern organizations. The procedure of scoping review was conducted by following four step guidelines as follows: 1

Results: research directions on CMC application in organizations
As regards the direction of research in the application of CMC in organizations, it can be noted that in recent years researchers have mostly focused on: a) CMC's challenges in organizational (team) and individual work contexts (e.g. CMC's impact on the employee's welfare and health, use of social networks to meet organizational goals and shape the organization's image, enhancing organizational culture and employee's identity, etc.); b) Application of CMC to increase the efficiency of organizational management (e.g. employee engagement, leadership, change management, project management, meeting management, team collaboration, etc.); c) Application of CMC to developing external communication, such as public relations; d) ICT feasibility studies (e.g. use of social media for employee interaction and collaboration, opportunities for using new smart devices in social integration, education, etc.).
These directions will be discussed in more detail further.

Challenges of CMC in the context of the organization's activities and individual work
Challenges for the use of CMC in the context of organizations' activities and individual work are wide-ranging, but in the light of recent research, certain specific challenges can be identified in this context.
First of all, it is the challenges of employee diversity and leadership. Organizations are facing a new type of problems. While training and integration of young professionals and conveyance of senior employee's experience have been discussed earlier, organizations are now faced with the need for universal and continuing education. One has to consider the fact that modern technologies are closer to a certain profile of employees, according to age and •39 records in total were identified and used for the research technology experience. Meanwhile, work experience in a specific field of activity is no longer such a significant advantage and is increasingly fading to the second plan. For this reason, the attitude of leadership and the necessary leadership abilities of the leader are also changing. Modern leadership is often understood as the involvement and example of managerial staff, the ability to prepare the organization to function in a changing environment (Bucăţa, Rizescu, 2017). Here, the crucial issue of the nature of ICT is emphasized. The most significant challenge facing organizations more or less is information overload, resulting in a very high amount of information that an employee is unable to process properly due to a lack of time. Another challenge is the feature overload, described as a situation where the employee does not have necessary skills and knowledge to use the appropriate technical equipment at the workplace. The third aspect of CMC implementation in organizations is communication overload, which does not allow sufficiently careful processing of the information received and misses focus on quality of work. Another specific CMC challenge is the agility aspect. Agility is commonly associated with the organization's ability to integrate, modify or synchronize internal and external business processes, considering the dynamics of the environment. However, as far as organizational communication is concerned, agility is associated with the high level of detail information inherent in the operation of IT systems and the corresponding need for structuring and detailing working information that adds additional burden to employees and requires them to take appropriate care of the communication process (Park et al., 2017;Sueldo, 2016). In other words, technology not only facilitates communication, it also complicates it, because it requires employees to have a specific knowledge and skills to provide and maintain the required information in an appropriate format and detail.
CMC inspires not only the need to work differently for individuals, both employees and leaders, but also the specifics of teamwork. Remote work comes into force, thus resulting that often team members have never interacted eye to eye. Naturally, this creates the need for a different, new teamwork culture, and so on. (Espinosa et al., 2015;Ai He et al., 2017). At the same time, more attention is paid to such phenomena or situations as inequal access to information or not well-timed presentation to the team, lack of consensus, disagreement on terms, work, or even communication forms and channels. All this complicates the decisionmaking processes in organizations, which is why some workers are confronted with resistance to CMC (Gutiérrez-Santiuste et al., 2016).
All of the mentioned CMC challenges to the employees and leadership combine the widespread phenomenon of technostress. Technostress is the stress of employees due to the unmanageable amount of information and related work tasks accompanied by short deadlines for assigning tasks. Technostress manifests itself in a variety of autonomous and personally conscious resistance forms of the worker's body (Akan, 2016). Technostress in the long run determines the general physiological deterioration of health, increased psychological stress and the expression of negative emotions (Atanasoff, Venable, 2017). As a result, the challenges of CMC and ICT should not be ignored or evaluated as the characteristics of the organizational environment determined by the era, non-targeted solutions.

Application of CMC by increasing efficiency of organization management
The previous sub-section shows that information technology poses significant challenges to individuals in organizations. However, CMC is recognized as one of the tools for assessing technologies when measuring not by individuals but by groups, which enables them to increase the efficiency of organizations, improve decision-making and teamwork, etc. Before discussing these and other aspects in more detail, an insight by Espinosa et al. (2015) is worth mentioning that nowadays, Face-to-Face communication is no longer the most appropriate option for global groups or organizations and organizations where groups in different locations work simultaneously. The impact of CMC on organizational management firstly reveals itself as an opportunity to unify the involvement of organization's employees into the organization, increase the accuracy of self-reflection and information received. On the other hand, while working and communicating in virtual teams, aspects of overloading tasks and time-consuming tasks remain important. ICT allows sending, receiving, transferring and technical processing of extremely large amounts of information, thus resulting in additional managerial problems of a psychological and behavioral nature. In organizations, it is expected for the responsible ones in all management units to accept considered and more risky solutions, just because they have a large amount of information. Unfortunately, when comparing the amount of information to the time it takes to make decisions, it becomes obvious that the time perspective is so limited that there is no theoretical possibility not only to consider, but also to reconcile decisions between all the interested parties. Furthermore, when accountable people are exposed to large amounts of new information and revisions, there is a reasonable doubt about the correctness of the decisions made. There is no certainty that decision-makers took time to evaluate all the data provided, consider last minute changes and ensure that all interested parties have the same information on the matter (Espinosa, 2015).
However, with the organization as a whole, digital communication management in today's organizations can be considered as a mean to increase the organization's brand value and create a strong identity and a new type of emotional relationship with its clients (

Positioning and formation of a brand
A positive image of the organization in the eyes of customers is important for achieving goals and sustainability of the organization. There are 3 possible forms towards image and position formation: instrumental (information transfer function), communication (function of communication creation) and validating (norm / value consolidation function) (Chaudhri, 2016).

Creating and maintaining customer relationships
In the context of a technologically advanced communication, not only the function of information conveyance but also the creation of an open, continuous feedback-based system is discussed. The use of ICT ensures a prompt and constructive dialogue with customers, thus reducing the risk of failure-breakdown (Collyer, 2016). Bearing in mind that organization's employees are also considered as being [internal] clients, CMC enables the creation and maintenance of a widespread communication network that operates on a regular basis and provides management with a variety of opportunities. These opportunities include a better understanding of business processes, needs of users and employees, problems, attracting new employees, as well as shaping market and individual consumption segments and, in general, influencing the organization's goals.

CMC application by developing public communication for the organization
The application of CMC through the development of external communication of the organization is one of the main directions of recent research. It is to be held that the use of ICT is an integral part of the communication process in today's networking organizations, regardless of their type of activity. Additionally, considering aspects such as characteristics of the generation Z, which now is rather new to the market, and increasingly intuitive ICT itself, it is stated that technological development promotes the change of communication processes and practices in organizations, especially in fields of public relation and business partnership. Therefore, the needs of organizations do not affect technological advancements as they used to do (Pang et al., 2018).
Researchers investigating public relations in various organizations point out those not necessarily large and advanced business organizations are the best example of the effectiveness of external communication. Public sector institutions, such as those at the level of EU government, or even certain organized groups such as the Islamic State, are capable of exerting a particular impact on the public through various channels of digital communication (Granda, 2016; Bole, Kallmyer, 2016). Bole and Kallmyer (2016) have analyzed how organizations combine CMC and network-enabled social media features and create a targeted, audience-oriented communication strategy and formulated the following components of effective public organizational communication: 1. The use of social media, social networks and smart-mobile devices; 2. Great knowledge of the target audience and the most accurate knowledge of the localization; 3. Interactive and visual material, involving direct communication and active contact with the audience; 4. Specific and simple message content with a clearly expressed emotional or ideological basis.
As seen above, organizations' public communication has certain features of mass communication. The most important of those is the simulation of personal and interpersonal communication in order to create a close emotional trust relationship with everyone in the audience.

Features of the research on CMC challenges
Analyzing the recent scientific discourse, it can be summarized that a broad CMC topic ( Table 2) is most often developed in four areas of CMC research. These are: -Training of employees through ICT and CMC capabilities; -The internal organizational environment and related processes in order to adapt to CMC challenges; -External organizational environment and related processes in the context of CMC opportunities; -The overall impact of ICT and CMC on organizations and the general public.   Although the task of detailing the latest issues of CMC research in the article is not raised, in answering the purpose of the article it is necessary to emphasize the most commonly discussed issue among scientists in each of the CMC research areas: 1. Employee training using capabilities of ICT and CMC. Studies of employee training show that the development of globalization and the so-called technological revolution are subject to specific training and learning needs. If it has been important for organizations to have high professional and team-building skills so far, it is becoming increasingly important for mid-level managers and international advisers to know at least a few foreign languages to expand their geography. For this aim, various ICT tools and programs are particularly useful. So, in scientific publications there is an increasing number of keywords such as computer assisted language learning (CALL), second language acquisition (SLA), etc. The benefits of ICT in language teaching are written by, for example, Ziegler . When discussing the latest CMC research, it is also noted that it is mostly focused on research in the real workplace by interviewing staff responsible for communication processes and senior personnel. Also, part of the research is based on monitoring trends in the use of ICT and the internet platform. And the fact that the CMC construct is not yet fully up-to-date is backed up by a considerable amount of literature in the nature of reviews and concept reviews.
Finally, it can be noted that since CMC's problem area is rather new compared to traditional communication research, a large proportion of researchers talk about the limitations of research and the need for future research as well (Table 2). However, specific topics or issues have not been resolved. Researchers often highlight our already mentioned CMC challenges.

Conclusions
Research of CMC in the current scientific discourse are pointed to highlight ICT and CMC challenges in contexts of inter-organizational, organizational, group (team) and inter-personal communication as well as to discuss a possibility to influence the opinion and behavior of customers and even society with the help of ICT.
An analysis of publications selected has shown that the concept of CMC is very broad; therefore, in the future it is recommended to narrow and specify the area towards one of the scoping review by choosing to consider communication in relation to these fields as follows: HRM, leadership, remote work and team management, organization of work processes, training and learning, interpersonal relations, sales, consumer behavior and marketing, public relations, the formation of public opinion and provisions, the possibilities of adapting the communication technologies, etc. Due to the diversibility of the applicability of the CMC concept, each of the mentioned areas would be significant and very useful to analyze to a more detailed manner.
Finally, the CMC scoping review has shown that researchers' focus on research in this area is not diminishing, which is why it is still important for the scientific community not to be reserved but to share insights with practitioners who are interested in applying scientific knowledge to improve the efficiency of the performance of organizations.