Change and crisis communication

Abstract

This chapter covers change communication and crisis communication, two increasingly important fields of research and practice. It starts off with organizational change communication and then enter the field of crisis communications. Research has shown that there is a close connection between change communication and crisis communication. Research shows that many organizational changes do not actually go very far and have very small effects on business. One of the authors has worked as a consultant for a Swedish car company, where the interviewees testified in a survey that they expected a major organizational change to occur every second year. To put it bluntly, one could say that effective crisis communication means first deciding what has actually happened and then describing and explaining the event clearly, with absolute transparency and unequivocal language.