Management Communication Quarterly 1–7 © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0893318915571350 mcq.sagepub.com Forum Essay An OPPT-In Approach to Relational and Emotional Organizational Communication Pedagogy Sarah J. Tracy 1 , Tara M. Franks 1 , Margaret M. Brooks 1 , and Trisha K. Hoffman 1 Growing evidence suggests that tomorrow’s workers face challenges interacting with one another competently and compassionately (Turkle, 2011). Meanwhile, young adults increasingly struggle to maintain meaningful relationships and hold emotionally competent conversations (Barnwell, 2014). Despite the impor- tance of relational communication competence in the workplace, life activities provide decreasing opportunities for its practice. This is why organizational communication courses are essential for creating future employees who under- stand and can practice or negotiate compassion, emotional labor, conflict nego- tiation, workplace bullying, and emotional intelligence. In this essay, we propose an ontological-phenomenological-phronetic-transformative (OPPT) approach— something we call OPPT-in—for providing students with access to engage in relational organizational communication in live, real-time experience. This approach differs from the traditional approach evidenced in most textbooks and syllabi. The Traditional Approach to Teaching Relational– Emotional Communication To create a picture of current practice, we conducted a Google search for organizational communication course syllabi from the past 5 years. From this list, we selected 17 syllabi as a maximum variation sample (Tracy, 2013) and 1 Arizona State University, Tempe, USA Corresponding Author: Sarah J. Tracy, The Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, Arizona State University, P.O. Box 871205, Tempe, AZ 85287-1205, USA. Email: Sarah.Tracy@asu.edu 571350MCQ XX X 10.1177/0893318915571350Management Communication QuarterlyTracy et al. research-article 2015 at ARIZONA STATE UNIV on February 25, 2015 mcq.sagepub.com Downloaded from