Crisis Communication Research Research Articles

Political Leaders' Communication Strategies during COVID-19 in Highly Infected Countries: A Scoping Review.

This scoping review maps communication strategies employed by political leaders in countries that experienced high infection rates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the Arksey and O'Malley scoping review framework, this study systematically explored the literature from 2019 to October 2023. The process involved identifying and selecting relevant studies, charting them, and summarizing the data from the 40 articles that met the inclusion criteria. This review identified a diverse array of communication strategies, which highlight the complex nature of crisis communication. These strategies featured the use of social media, science-based policy communication, strategic narrative control, empathy, ideological influences, and storytelling. These six approaches underscore the importance of adaptability and context-specific strategies in political leadership during a health crisis. The findings demonstrate that political communication during the pandemic varied significantly and was influenced by factors such as media platform, political ideology, gender, and non-verbal cues. This review enriches our understanding of crisis communication in political contexts. It emphasizes the necessity of combining traditional and digital media and considering various sociopolitical factors. The insights gained are crucial for enhancing crisis management and public trust, and they set the stage for further research and practical application in crisis communication.

Situating deep learning in a relating management approach: Examining the dynamics and outcomes of contingent organization-public relationships (COPRs) in crisis

Existing research in crisis communication and public relations focuses on relationship quality or outcomes, along with their causes and effects, mainly using cross-sectional survey data. This research expands the COPR theoretical framework by employing big data and deep learning to analyze the dynamics and intricacies of corporate and public stances during a long-term organizational crisis. Focusing on Monsanto/Bayer’s Roundup crisis from 2012 to 2022, the study analyzed 232,694 tweets and 334 articles to examine corporate stances, public stances, and various relationship modes formed from both party’s standpoints throughout the crisis. The results show the evolving and interdependent interactions between corporations and their publics, as well as the longitudinal impacts of public stances on stock prices. Our findings highlight the application of computational methods for enhancing strategic decision-making in managing organization-public relationships, particularly during prolonged and complex crisis scenarios.

Mediated crises and strategic crisis communication of third sector organizations: a content analysis of crisis reporting in six countries

PurposeThis study aims to contribute to strategic crisis communication research by exploring international media representations of third sector crises and crisis response; expanding the range of crisis types beyond transgressions; and developing a framework that integrates framing and crisis communication theory.Design/methodology/approachQuantitative content analysis was applied to identify patterns in crisis reporting of 18 news media outlets in Canada, Germany, India, Switzerland, UK and US. Using an inductive framing approach, crisis coverage of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) between 2015 and 2018 was analyzed across a wide range of crises, including but not limited to prominent cases such as Oxfam, Kids Company, or the Islamic Research Foundation.FindingsThe news media in six countries report more internal crises in the third sector than external crises. The most frequent crisis types were fraud and corruption, sexual violence/personal exploitation and attacks on organizations. Exploratory factor analysis revealed three components of crisis response strategies quoted in the media, conditional rebuild, defensive and justified denial strategies. Causal attributions and conditional rebuild strategies significantly influenced media evaluations of organizational crisis response. Three frames of third sector crises were detected; the critique, the damage and the victim frame. These frames emphasize different crisis types, causes, crisis response strategies and evaluations of crisis response.Originality/valueThe study reveals the particularities of crises and crisis communication in the third sector and identifies factors that influence mediated portrayals of crises and crisis response strategies of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) from an international comparative perspective. The findings have relevant implications for crisis communication theory and practice.

Laughing at Failure or Failing to Laugh: Humour as a Strategy for Dealing With Foreign Policy Failure?

The paper considers the role of humour in dealing with failure in foreign policy and brings insights together from the studies of policy failure, humour studies, customer service management and crisis communication. It investigates how research in customer service management and crisis communication points to the use of humour as an additional strategy for dealing with foreign policy failure. This research has provided valuable insights into the benefits of humour for dealing with minor service failure, reducing the level of damage done to the standing of the actor responsible for the failure. The paper transfers these insights into IR and investigates the benefits and drawbacks of self-deprecating humour by policy makers responsible for failure. To illustrate this, we consider the humour employed by US President George W. Bush at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2004 when making fun of his administration’s inability to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. We argue that humour can be a tool to address policy failure only in front of a sympathetic audience when humour can be a means of addressing the cognitive tension between support for a policy and its empirical failure.

Building the new architecture of crisis management: Global experts' insights on best and worst practices for securing external funding

AbstractExternal funding is an important yet understudied area of inquiry in crisis communication research. With external funding being a keystone of assessing and broadening research impact in both academia and industry, it is important for scholarship to examine effective practices for funding proposals. This study explores the best and worst practices for funded research through an expert consultation survey of 36 global communication scholars with track records of funding success. Findings reveal motivating factors for seeking, securing and managing funding, as well as institutional factors. Findings also inform best and worst practices for securing external funding, including bridging theory and practice and establishing strong research partnerships.

Assist or accuse? Identifying trends in crisis communication through a bibliometric literature review

AbstractCommunication has always been key to crisis management research, but even more so in recent years, from multiple disciplinary angles. In this bibliometric study and review of the literature, we aim to identify different clusters of crisis communication research in the literature and whether and how much these crisis communication research clusters overlap. With different fields taking an interest in crisis communication, we ask ourselves where the interests of these fields overlap, and to what extent the different communities are aware of each other's work. Apart from offering an overview of topical clusters in crisis communication research and connections between those clusters of studies on crisis communication, we identify and explain two main approaches to crisis communication: a political or accusatory approach, and a functional or assistory approach. We conclude in our study and discussion that these approaches may need to broaden their research horizons to ensure the applicability of crisis communication strategies beyond the countries, media platforms, and audience orientations that have predominantly shaped the existing research landscape.

Crisis Communication: Conceptualizing the Efficacy of Information Source Credibility on Crisis Message Acceptability and Reputation Sustainability

Recent studies have shown that social media users' perception of message acceptance and compliance during a crisis depends on its source credibility, and this has been relatively underexplored in the crisis communication context. The credibility of social media/information sources influences the users' attitudes and information quality, public engagement, and information believability during a crisis. In response to crisis communication, scholars revealed that despite the wide use of SCCT by crisis communication researchers, the theory still has limitations in evaluating factors that could potentially affect an organizational reputation. Response source credibility is a factor that influences crisis response strategies and sustains reputation. During emergencies, unreliable and untrustworthy sources of information and media coverage of content perceived as threatening can elicit aversive emotions, such as distress, depression, and mental damage, and further generate more crises. This study proposes a conceptual model for the efficacy of source credibility on message (crisis response) acceptability and reputation sustainability. To monitor the streams of research conducted on source credibility, the authors used the Scopus database to examine the numbers of research on source credibility in the domain of crisis communication and subject areas. The results revealed that the perceived information source credibility during a crisis influences message acceptance and mediates the relationships between crisis response strategies and reputation. The paper will help the crisis management team appreciate the value of source credibility and save reputation during a crisis.

Examining the Intersection of Sport, Social Media, and Crisis Communication

The purpose of this commentary is to present the state of sport, social media, and crisis communication research. Existing crisis-communication research involving athletes and coaches; collegiate institutions; teams, leagues, and governing bodies; journalists; and other sport entities are discussed. The commentary concludes with a discussion of directions for future research, including (a) interviewing industry professionals, (b) employing survey design to examine user response, (c) employing experimental design with social media manipulations, (d) validating and developing frameworks, and (e) examining additional social media platforms.

Breaking waves: A bibliometric odyssey on crisis communication in tourism and hospitality (1980–2022) and paving the path for future research

AbstractTourism and hospitality crisis communication research (THCCR) has produced a large corpus of literature with a disparate set of themes since 1980. Few studies have traced the growth of crisis communication in tourism research. In this paper, we attempt a state‐of‐the‐art examination of the growth and development of THCCR by adopting a quantitative bibliometric approach. The analysis traces the development of the social, intellectual and conceptual structures of the field along with its thematic evolution. The analysis reveals three dominant clusters of themes, namely: crisis communication and social media; tourism, crisis and disaster and crisis management and COVID‐19. The findings provide several theoretical and practical implications. The study concludes by providing directions for future research.

Internal crisis communication: The effects of negative employee-organization relationships on internal reputation and employees’ unsupportive behavior

This study seeks to advance the growing body of research in internal crisis communication by exploring the role of negative employee-organization relationships (NEOR) in determining crisis outcomes (employees' unsupportive behavior and internal reputation). The current study was conducted using 465 full-time employees working in the technology sector (phone manufacturing industry) in the United States. The employees were recruited using an online research tool, Qualtrics. Multiple hierarchical regression and path analysis were used to analyze the results. The results reveal that a) NEOR affects internal reputation negatively and increases the likelihood of unsupportive behavior, b) timing does not affect the relationship between NEOR and crisis outcomes, c) rebuilding strategies help in overcoming employees' unwillingness to support the organization during a crisis, and d) negative emotions influence the effect of NEOR on the crisis outcomes. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

A Dual-Process Model of Promoting Employee Mental Health in Crises: Impacts of Leadership Health Support and Organizational Leaders’ Crisis Communication in COVID-19

ABSTRACT This study examined how organizations may promote their employees’ mental health in difficult times. Drawing from organizational crisis communication and organizational health promotion research, it proposed and tested a dual-process model that links leadership health support, an essential dimension of organizational health culture, with organizational leaders’ crisis communication (i.e. use of ethical-base responses) and workers’ self-care awareness and perceived stress in a crisis. Through a survey of 502 full-time U.S. employees conducted during COVID-19, we found that organizational leaders’ use of ethical-base responses predicted employees’ enhanced self-care awareness and decreased stress levels. Further, leadership health support provided a double-buffer effect to sustain employee mental health by directly bolstering employees’ self-care awareness and organizational leaders’ use of ethical-base responses. The findings of this study bridge the gaps in organizational health promotion and crisis communication literature and offer practical suggestions for organizations seeking to foster employees’ mental health challenges during crises.

Supporting an Invisible Workforce: The Case for the Creation of the Home Healthcare Workers Support Act.

This Article seeks to synthesize academic research on home healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand how their workplace challenges were magnified. Crisis communication researchers note that a crisis provides both opportunities and threats for growth. This Article argues that many of the issues that have impacted home healthcare workers have always been present, but the pandemic allows policy makers the ability to see them clearly because the pandemic brought a spotlight to the issues that home healthcare workers face on a daily basis. Consequently, the author employed a narrative analysis of the literature concerning home healthcare workers during the pandemic to understand how the pandemic exacerbated structural issues that led to an increase in mental health difficulties for this population. By understanding how the pandemic exacerbated mental health issues, policy makers can craft solutions that can withstand the next public health crisis which will undoubtedly impact the most disenfranchised.

Incorporating competition and comparisons into crisis communication: How competing organizations respond to industry crises

Crisis communication research typically focuses on how a single organization strategically responds to crises based on its own set of situational factors. However, it is common for multiple competing organizations to be involved in responding to the same crisis. By analyzing two industry crisis cases in China, this study provides insights into what we termed competitive crisis communication, which involves not only crisis response timing and strategies but also competition and comparisons among the different organizations involved in the same crisis. The analysis of organizational statements on social media reveals the extent of differences in crisis response strategies adopted by competing organizations. Findings from an analysis of online media coverage and public posts on social media further suggest that stakeholders’ comparisons of different organizations’ crisis responses can influence stakeholders’ emotions and reputational perceptions of the organizations. Finally, the competitive advantages for an organization to respond as the first mover or late mover in industry crisis communication are discussed.

Using artificial intelligence to identify emergency messages on social media during a natural disaster: A deep learning approach

During natural disasters, emergency communication systems become overloaded, and people are forced to turn to social media to make requests for help. This study employs machine learning and artificial intelligence to automatically detect, identify, and categorize tweets relevant to first responders during Hurricane Harvey. We curate a dataset of tweets, present a labeling scheme based on relevance and urgency, and develop neural and non-neural machine learning models to automatically categorize tweets. Our best relevance classifiers, language models BERT and XLNet, perform significantly better than non-neural models and the deep convolutional neural network (CNN) and achieve comparable F1 scores. Ultimately, this study furthers machine learning and crisis communication research by developing methods to automatically categorize tweets that can signal to first responders of individuals’ requests for help in urgent, life-threatening disasters. Our work also finds large pretrained language models promising for the development of well-performing disaster tweet classifiers in future work.

U.S. Nonprofit Organizations Respond to the COVID-19 Crisis: The Influence of Communication, Crisis Experiences, Crisis Management, and Organizational Characteristics

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are significant contributors culturally, socially, and economically, but little research has focused on their management of organizational crises. Research has been quickly documenting impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on different sectors, but again less so for NPOs. This is significant because research and recommendations developed in one sector (such as for-profit corporations) may not translate to others (such as NPOs). NPOs are particularly vulnerable due to their dependence on public financial support and demands on their resource during crises. We report on a unique and unfortunate opportunity to assess response dynamics from a half year before (2019) and a half year after (2020) the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. We draw on a unique dataset (combining surveys at two points in time, Twitter use data, and financial information, from 578 NPOs) to develop a general model (grounded in the discourse of renewal theory) of five sources of influence (communication, organizational resources, crisis experience, crisis management, crisis impacts) on three types of strategic responses by nonprofits (retrenchment, persevering, and innovating) to COVID-19. Higher levels of communication, crisis experience, and crisis management all predicted greater tendencies for persevering and innovating in response to COVID-19. The implications for research and practice include extending crisis communication research to the nonprofit sector and demonstrating how NPOs can strengthen themselves to recover from COVID-19 or the next crisis.

IScotland: building a unified model of activism in multi-platform communication environments from traditional PR theory

PurposeIn recent years, there has been a growth in research aimed at understanding the foundations of modern activist communication in media-rich and multi-platform environments. For example, Chon and Park's analysis of the American Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement built on Kim and Grunig's STOPS model. Yet, social and political injustice can exist for extended periods of time without successful movements emerging, so what leads people to demand social and political change through activism? This paper posits that crisis is trigger that motivates people to activism and evaluates that within the context of the Scottish independence movement.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on in-depth interviews with 26 advocates for Scottish independence, which yielded more than 32 h of data. Data were analysed using Strauss and Corbin's (1990) constant comparative method approach using open coding, axial coding and selective coding finding thematic saturation after only 10 interviews.FindingsThe study provides a clear extension of Chon and Park's model of activism by finding that crises are critical triggers for activism. Moreover, these findings also provide insights into not only the Scottish independence movement but more broadly the extension of traditional public relations and communication theory in multi-platform and multi-actor environments.Originality/valueThere are several contributions this piece makes. First, this paper extends activist, crisis and strategic communication research to more systematically consider the role that crisis plays in social and political advocacy. Second, this paper affords the opportunity to consider the challenges of communication, democracy and activism in the social media age. Finally, this paper supports an international view that discrimination and affective injustice experiences cut across many different kinds of identities and experiences instead of the traditionally considered ethnic, religious and gender-based experiences traditionally addressed.

Bibliometric, network, and thematic mapping analyses of metaphor and discourse in COVID-19 publications from 2020 to 2022.

The research contributions of metaphor as part of (critical) discourse studies have flourished during COVID-19; hence, it is necessary to consider their progress and foresee their future growth. To obtain a comprehensive understanding of COVID metaphor research in discourse and to identify the most recent research foci, bibliometric, network, thematic mapping and word cloud analyses were conducted in this study. The results showed that (1) research on COVID metaphors is largely shaped by Critical Discourse Analysis research approaches and methodologies; (2) the research production has investigated traditional genres such as news and emerging genres, including social media and multimodal data; and (3) research highlights the role played by metaphors in persuasion in public discourse. The findings of this study can assist future research in this or related fields by providing an overview of metaphor research in crisis communication.

An Analysis of Police Department Crisis Communication via Social Media

When police use-of-force incidents involving citizens occur, it is necessary to examine the communication post-crisis. Communication via social media is efficient and is considered a necessary tool in contemporary policing. To date, few studies have investigated the use of socially mediated messages in response to use-of-force incidents in local communities. This research examined the social media sites of six police departments in the United States following the death of George Floyd for themes established in crisis communication research. Findings suggest that police departments used social media to convey empathy, commitment to stakeholders, and self-efficacy, with empathy being the theme that was used most frequently. As this is an emerging area of research, directions for future research and policy implementation are discussed.

Beyond reputational and financial damage: Examining emotional and religious harm in a post-crisis case study of Hillsong Church

Religious organizations have largely been overlooked in public relations scholarship, particularly in the crisis communication literature. Additionally, research in crisis communication primarily focuses on the reputational, material, and financial damage caused by crises. This study addresses theoretical and topical gaps in public relations scholarship by advancing Spaulding’s (2018) emotional and religious harm categories for moral crises within religious organizations. Results of a qualitative case study of Hillsong Church’s Carl Lentz crisis suggest an emotional harm continuum exists for moral crises, and religious harm emerges as distancing as a religious protective measure. Findings advance crisis communication theory regarding the use of religious and renewal rhetoric and types of harm inflicted from crises, and assists practitioners in crafting post-crisis messages that prioritize stakeholder healing and the organization’s recovery.

The interactive effect of mindfulness and internal listening on internal crisis management and its outcomes: the moderating role of emotional exhaustion

PurposeInternal crisis communication (ICC) has become a burgeoning area of research in crisis communication. However, the importance of ICC as a tool to enhance employee positive communicative behaviour in crisis has not been explored. This study aims to develop a research model by drawing from the ideas of sensemaking and network theories. In addition, the study further examines how the elements of the proposed model drive ICC while assessing employee-related outcomes and the role of emotion exhaustion.Design/methodology/approachTo assess the validity of the measurement and structural models, 316 employees from both public and private non-profit organisations in Pakistan were interviewed through online survey. The collected data were analysed using co-variance based structural equation modelling (CV-SEM).FindingsThe results of this research confirmed that mindfulness and internal listening positively affect employee perceptions towards internal communication during a crisis. Similarly, ICC positively influences employees' perception of loyalty, job insecurity and the organisation's reputation. The results also highlight the moderation roles of emotional exhaustion (EE).Practical implicationsThe study suggests that applying ICC strategies will help crisis managers develop collaborative relationships with employees, which will help in identifying and managing a crisis. In addition, implementing effective internal communication in corporate practices and processes makes internal reputation and employee loyalty (EL) a reality and allows organisations to remain productive despite crises.Originality/valueThrough the lens of sensemaking theory, this research demonstrated that mindfulness and listening should be considered stimuli in organisations that can influence employees to be active communicators before and during crises. This study is the first to elucidate the essential outcomes for strategic internal crisis management that are often under-looked, such as emotional responses. The study also shows that sensemaking should not only focus on meaning-making in a crisis but also include emotional feelings that can wear out the meaning-making process.