Abstract
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world, requiring emergency management by health authorities and providers, it created flow-on crises and “crisis contagion” for organizations ranging from international airlines and tourism operators to local businesses, schools, and universities. In addition to the risks directly associated with the health emergency, many organizations were plunged into crisis because of severe restrictions to their operations and income losses. This analysis examines crisis communication in an organization faced with major financial losses, staff redundancies, and disruption. It analyses how these and necessary crisis responses were communicated to stakeholders, using situational crisis communication theory (SCCT), as its analytical framework. While noting alternative perspectives such as crisis and emergency risk communication (CERC) theory, SCCT is identified as the most widely applied theory of crisis communication, and thus warrants ongoing review in an era of media fragmentation, disinformation, and low public trust. Furthermore, this analysis provides a relatively rare “inside” (emic) perspective through ethnography and autoethnography conducted by a senior decision-maker in the organization studied, which expands traditional outside (etic) perspectives and offers new insights into crisis communication.
Highlights
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world, requiring emergency management by health authorities and providers, it created flow-on crises and “crisis contagion” for organizations ranging from international airlines and tourism operators to local businesses, schools, and universities
“Walk arounds” to laboratories and occupied offices undertaken by the author and other members of the faculty executive team (FET) were greeted with enthusiasm and gratitude by staff members, with frequent comments such as “Thank you for coming to see us” and “It’s good to see someone from management.”
This study supports suggestions to expand crisis communication theory beyond the “managerial bias” noted by Waymer and Heath (2007) and the narrow focus on apologia and reputation protection discussed by Arendt et al (2017)
Summary
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world, requiring emergency management by health authorities and providers, it created flow-on crises and “crisis contagion” for organizations ranging from international airlines and tourism operators to local businesses, schools, and universities. In addition to the risks directly associated with the health emergency, many organizations were plunged into crisis because of severe restrictions to their operations and income losses This analysis examines crisis communication in an organization faced with major financial losses, staff redundancies, and disruption. While noting alternative perspectives such as crisis and emergency risk communication (CERC) theory, SCCT is identified as the most widely applied theory of crisis communication, and warrants ongoing review in an era of media fragmentation, disinformation, and low public trust This analysis provides a relatively rare “inside” (emic) perspective through ethnography and autoethnography conducted by a senior decisionmaker in the organization studied, which expands traditional outside (etic) perspectives and offers new insights into crisis communication. Compared with crises analyzed in academic literature over several decades, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on organizations in many sectors was unprecedented and beyond the scale of most crisis management and crisis communication case studies
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