Management of Crisis Communication in Organisations FEC-12 MTE PROJECT PROPOSAL Ayush Aggarwal and Hardik Lal What is Crisis Communication • Crisis communication can be defined broadly as the collection, processing, and dissemination of information required to address a crisis situation. • It is the dialog between the organization and its public prior to, during, and after the negative occurrence. The dialog details strategies and tactics designed to minimize damage to the image of the organization. What are the examples of such crisis? • Crises can be classified into three major types: 1) Crises of the physical world, including natural disasters and failures of technology, such as nuclear power 2) Crises of the human climate, including confrontation with adversary groups and malevolent acts of governments, groups and individuals 3) Crises of management failure, arising from mismanagement, skewed values, deception and misconduct Rationale: examples of events that could not be handled without proper crisis communication tactics NIKE STARBUCKS In 2018, female employees spoke out about the maledominated culture that fostered harassment and discrimination in the workplace. In April 2018, two men went to a Philadelphia Starbucks to meet a friend. They sat at a table waiting to order and asked to use the restroom. The result? The manager on duty called the police and the two African American men were—wrongfully— arrested for trespassing. Some examples of internal communication problems that went wrong here include: >It took a renegade survey by a group of employees to reveal this toxic culture >Lack of trust in HR >A leader who says he was unaware of the problems >Inefficient methods of bottom-up communication The video of the arrest went viral and by the next day, #boycottStarbucks was trending on social media. What might have started as a store manager attempting to follow a company policy turned into a racially-biased encounter that even the Starbucks CEO called a “reprehensible outcome.” Objectives of the research • This is a topic many people don’t know about, so the objective of this research is to educate about the importance of crisis communication and management in an organisation. • To learn about different steps involved in crisis communication and find if the common steps are the most effective or not. • To understand how organisations who don’t have a proper crisis communication and management system in place collapse in times of crisis. List of Research Papers Author’s Name Year of Publication Title of Paper APA Citation W. Timothy Coombs 2018 Crisis communication The Best Evidence From Research Coombs, T. W. (2018). Crisis communication. Encyclopedia of public relations, 2. LM McDonald, B Sparks and AI Glendon 2010 Stakeholder reactions to company crisis communication, and causes McDonald, L. M., Sparks, B., & Glendon, A. I. (2010). Stakeholder reactions to company crisis communication and causes. Public Relations Review, 36(3), 263-271. SR Veil, RA Husted 2012 Best Practices as an Assessment for Crisis Communication Veil, S. R., & Husted, R. A. (2012). Best practices as an assessment for crisis communication. Journal of Communication Management. M Taylor, DC Perry 2005 Diffusion of traditional and new media tactics in crisis communication Taylor, M., & Perry, D. C. (2005). Diffusion of traditional and new media tactics in crisis communication. Public Relations Review, 31(2), 209-217. F Frandsen, W Johansen 2011 The study of internal crisis communication: towards an integrative framework Frandsen, F., & Johansen, W. (2011). The study of internal crisis communication: towards an integrative framework. Corporate Communications: An International Journal. Brief summaries of the research papers Crisis communication The Best Evidence From Research • A crisis can harm or kill stakeholders and always inflict at least some reputation damage on an organisation. Crises are driven by violation of stakeholder’s expectations. • Different crisis response strategies have different outcomes on the crisis and crisis managers should be able to decide when to use what strategy. • Timing is very important in crisis communication. W. Timothy Coombs Stakeholder reactions to company crisis communication, and causes • Despite the burgeoning number of studies examining stakeholder effects of crisis communication and crisis causes, the varied categorizations used, together with inconsistent findings, has meant that knowledge gaps remain. • This study adds to existing crisis research by using an experimental survey design to investigate the impact of accounts and crisis causes on multiple stakeholder reactions. LM McDonald, B Sparks and AI Glendon Best practices as an assessment for crisis communication • The overall goal of best practice research and development is to learn from the experiences of the past, detect errors, correct them, then determine ways to apply learning and practical knowledge to foster continued improvements. By using best practices as an assessment tool post-crisis, organizations can look at each specific practice through the lens of the crisis to enact organizational learning and thereby prepare the organization to better apply the practices next time. • This study demonstrates the effectiveness of the best practices as an assessment tool through an analysis of American Red Cross’s response to Hurricane Katrina. SR Veil and RA Husted Diffusion of traditional and new media tactics in crisis communication • The Internet is emerging as an important tool for organizations to communicate with journalists and publics. This article reports the results of a five point-in-time study of organizational use of the Internet in crisis communication. • The data suggest that about half of the organizations experiencing a national crisis are integrating the Internet into their response. To illustrate this diffusion, the article provides exemplars of innovative Internet response during crisis. M Taylor and DC Perry The study of internal crisis communication: towards an integrative framework • Previous crisis communication research has primarily examined the external dimension of crisis communication, i.e. the crisis response strategies applied by organizations to protect and/or restore their image or reputation among external stakeholders in a crisis situation. The purpose of this paper is to set up an integrative framework for the study of internal crisis communication in private and public organizations F. Frandsen and W. Johansen Methodology • This is a very vast and important topic. Existing research papers will be the prime sources for this research. We will go through multiple research papers and case studies, and provide a collective view of all the papers and the overall topic. We will also be on the lookout for any gaps in research and literature of this topic and try to fill them, if at all possible, in this project. DATA SOURCES Internet and Google Scholar is used to obtain all the information and carry out this research. All the authors, whose works and papers are used to derive information for this project are mentioned.
