Communication as a Strategic Orientation: Effects on Trust, Sensemaking, and Decision-Making

Organizations increasingly operate in environments marked by uncertainty, rapid change, and heightened interpretive demands. This study examines how communication orientation shapes key organizational processes under such conditions. Rather than treating communication as a set of messages or responses, the study conceptualizes strategic and reactive communication as distinct organizational orientations with different implications for coherence, trust, sensemaking, and decision effectiveness. Using survey data from 200 organizational members, the study employs correlation analysis, ordinary least squares regression, and bootstrapped mediation and moderation models. The results show that a strategic communication orientation is consistently associated with higher organizational coherence, stronger trust in leadership, clearer collective sensemaking, and greater perceived decision effectiveness. In contrast, a reactive communication orientation is linked to lower trust and fragmented sensemaking. Organizational coherence and trust in leadership partially mediate the relationship between strategic communication and decision effectiveness, indicating that communication influences decisions primarily through relational and interpretive mechanisms. The moderating role of environmental turbulence was not statistically supported. The findings position communication orientation as a structural dimension of leadership and governance, demonstrating that decision effectiveness depends less on responsiveness and more on communicative clarity, consistency, and explanatory capacity.