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The Effect of High-Impact Writing on Decision Making Within a Public Sector Bureaucracy

The Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA

This study, conducted in a medium-size federal government agency, assesses whether readers evaluating reports written in a high-impact style make better decisions than readers evaluating the same reports written in a bureaucratic style that is the organization's norm. Results indicate that respondents reading high-impact reports did not make statistically significant better decisions than those reading bureaucratic reports. To explain these results, the study analyzes the effect that organizationally-specific context factors - perceived work roles, job design, organizational structure, report genre expectations, and organiza tional language norms - have on respondents' reading and interpretation processes and attitudes toward the high-impact reports. Qualitative data show that these context factors caused readers to perceive the high-impact reports as abnormal discourse, thus deflecting their attention from the interpretation and analysis of report content.

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