Internal Crisis Communication

Crisis Awareness, Leadership and Coworkership

Mats Heide, Charlotte Simonsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429756818
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

We live in a crisis society, with traditional media responding on a minute-by-minute basis on daily, seemingly inevitable, organizational crises. Whether crises have become more prevalent or we're simply more aware of them, they are now of great concern to organizations and crisis management and communication is a priority. Most organizations have a crisis response plan; many have dedicated crisis and security management staff. Yet much of the emphasis has been on action outside of the organization. Neglecting communication between managers and employees, they risk poor, inconsistent crisis management and the very real possibility of crisis escalation. Crisis management, like charity, begins in the home.

Internal Crisis Communication is one of the first guides to communication inside organizations, before, during and after a crisis – not just on the acute crisis phase – to provide a complete and holistic guide for managers that will help them manage and contain crises. It includes an in-depth real-life case study, referred to throughout, from the author's own experience, which makes practical application explicit and the methodology clear.

Strengthened by rigorous academic research and tested in real-life crisis situations, the methods included in this book will be invaluable for communication professionals, security officers and crisis managers, as well as valuable reading for students and researchers interested in crisis and risk management.

Chapter 1
Crises and communication

THE COMING CHAPTER lays the groundwork for this book. We discuss the concepts of crisis, risk, organizational crises and crisis communication as a field of research and two perspectives within this field.

Crises

Crises can be regarded both as something negative and catastrophic and as a turning point, and also as a chance to develop and learn. This applies across the board, from society and organizations, all the way down to individuals. A crisis can be a turning point, in which important decisions must be made and pervasive ways of thinking and acting are challenged and ultimately need to be changed. Crises can therefore be seen as an enabler and an opportunity for development.

If you ask someone to describe and define a crisis, the definition you are given is most often the sort of crisis that people experience themselves, meaning the different sorts of “life crises” that everyone goes through at one point or another in his or her life. Life crises can be anything from illness to unemployment, financial hardships, the passing of a loved one, bullying, divorce and everything in between. In this book we are focusing solely on organizational crises, although that is not to say that they are isolated from crises on an individual or societal level (see Figure 1.1). Organizational crises affect co-workers and their relatives, suppliers, owners and customers. Furthermore, some major organizational crises may have major repercussion in society and in the places where the organizations are located. This could entail closures due to financial crises, and as a result, local residents may lose their jobs and the opportunity to support themselves and their families. Co-workers often end up in life crises because of their suddenly changed life situation, which can negatively affect their identity (Who am I really?) and self-esteem (I’m worthless!). Society as a whole can also be severely affected by, for example, a major discharge or technical failure in traffic management and traffic monitoring systems for trains. Crises can thus be placed on a scale depending on who they affect (Vigsø, 2015).

Figure 1.1 Who can be affected by the crisis?

Source: Vigsø (2015).

The Swedish encyclopedia Nationalencyklopedin (www.ne.se) gives six different explanations for the word crisis, all with their own meanings:

• Individual life crises. This entry is the longest, and it describes the psychological crisis that people go through when they find themselves in a situation that they cannot handle without risking major mental illness. A normal crisis path, divided into four phases, is described as follows: the shock phase, the reaction phase, the processing phase and the reorientation phase.
• The turning point in a course of illness.
• The moment when there is a sudden and drastic change in the economy, often due to decreasing demand or increasing costs within a particular industry.
• The Swedish nonprofit organization kris (in English, crisis) – Criminals Return Into Society.
• A Javanese ceremonial, double-edged dagger.
• The Swedish culture journal Kris (in English, Crisis) that was in print between 1977 and 1997.

The first three entries are the only ones that are connected to our typical associations to the word crisis. The lexical definition of the word crisis is a critical turning point, which is in line with the first three entries in Nationalencyklopedin.

The word crisis originates from the Greek word krisis, which means “decisive moment,” “separation,” “judgment” and “verdict.” In other words, a situation that we call a crisis entails a serious challenge that requires extra effort, resources and the energy of individuals, organizations and communities to be managed and, in the best of circumstances, resolved. Crises are usually associated with a threat to things of great value, such as life, property, safety, health and psychological stability (Sellnow & Seeger, 2013).

The concept of crisis does not in and of itself mean negative or destructive, but rather, it means challenging. Researchers such as Berger and Luckmann (1966) describe crises as a dissolution of reality, or a situation wherein that which is “normal” no longer exists. In contrast, we have all been fed the negative aspects of crises by our friends’ personal accounts of crises, as well as by the constant attention that the mass media places on reporting different types of crises. Focusing on crises is a natural part of the so-called media logic that sociologists David Altheide and Robert Snow (1979) have coined. According to media logic, reporters oversimplify and place an emphasis on personalization and dramatization as a result of strong competition for attention. Journalists are happy to report on, for example, celebrities’ miserable divorces, corporate trust crises and different sorts of scare tactics, such as articles saying we need to avoid palm oil, sugar, fat, cell phones and so on.

Figure 1.2 The Chinese characters for crisis

In this book we choose to view crises as a turning point that presents opportunities. This is in line with the Chinese interpretation of crises, which, according to the Chinese symbol for crises, can be interpreted as renewal and new order. In Chinese, crisis is written with the two characters wēi and jī (see Figure 1.2). The first character can be translated into “danger,” and the second can be equated with “crucial moment” or “starting point.” The Chinese symbol for crisis therefore includes both the positive and the negative, thus giving a slightly better and more balanced view of what crisis means.

In other words, there is an inherent contrast in the concept of crisis: destruction and opportunity (Gilpin & Murphy, 2008). Seeger, Sellnow, and Ulmer (2003) state that

[c]risis is part of the natural organizational process, purging system elements that are outdated and inappropriate and creating new and unexpected opportunities for development and change, growth, evolution, and renewal.

(p. 7)

Thus, an organization that has undergone a crisis, and thereafter reflected, discussed, transformed and taken in new lessons and experiences, is better equipped to handle future changes and has a higher competitive strength in the market.

We do not have the space to discuss all the aspects of a crisis and do not further discuss individual and societal crises in this book. All the rest of our attention is placed on organizational crises.

Organizations and crises

Crises are so normal that organizations should be wondering about when, not if, they are going to occur. Bozeman (2011, p. 120) is even a bit dramatic in saying that “[b]ad things happen in and to organizations.” Mistakes and accidents that can lead to a crisis happen each and every day in organizations, and organizational management cannot afford to say, “It could never happen here” (Coombs, 2006, p. 4). It’s human nature to ignore threats and risks, and organizations therefore need to have risk and crisis awareness systems in place, if they want to be successful in the long run.

The world we live in today is increasingly global and complex, where systems are closely connected, and organizations’ operations transcend geographical and temporal borders. It is therefore increasingly common to talk about transboundary crises (Ansell, Boin, & Keller, 2010), which involve organizations, politicians and public organizations in many different countries. Beck (1992) was early in saying that more and more crises are transboundary crises, such as the nuclear accident in Chernobyl, where the fallout was long-reaching and had severe consequences for many people, even those far from the city.

Another clear example of a transboundary crisis is the Muhammad drawings, which affected the dairy company Arla’s operations in Arab countries and had major political consequences. This crisis began in October 2005, when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve caricatures of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, with the cited intention of contributing to the debate about self-censorship in Denmark. The publication of these caricatures provoked the ambassadors for 11 Muslim countries to invite the Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen to a meeting to discuss the matter. However, the prime minister refused to meet with the ambassadors, stating that a meeting would acknowledge that there was something to discuss. According to Rasmussen, there was nothing to discuss as Danish law protects freedom of the press. This led to a boycott of Danish products in Muslim countries, by which Arla was especially hard hit; in 2006, it was estimated to have lost over 400 million Danish crowns because of the boycott. In other words, one local event can rapidly evolve and spread across national borders.

Risks and crises

Risks and crises are inherently intertwined. Risks can be described as dangerous events that have a certain likelihood of occurring, and that can have serious consequences for an organization (Andersen & Spitzberg, 2009). Both natural factors, such as floods, thunderstorms and earthquakes, and human factors, such as wrong decisions or mistakes in, for example, nuclear power plants, lie behind risks. Crises can be viewed as a risk that has manifested or materialized (Heath & O’Hair, 2009). A risk turns into a crisis situation when the risk itself is not properly handled after it has arisen. Nevertheless, the mutual relationship between risk and crises has not been commonly discussed in the literature, though the research on risk and crises has developed in parallel in different disciplines. On an overall level, risk communication is characterized by information on any specific risk from an expert to a receiving group (Palenchar, 2009). The aim is thus to inform the recipients about the existence of a risk. It is expected that this information will give the recipients better knowledge and thus better capabilities to avoid potentially harmful risks. According to Heath and O’Hair (2009, p. 9), both risk and crisis communication are built on the cultural stereotype “You can’t make an omelet without breaking an egg.” In other words, no development is possible without a certain degree of risk-taking involved.

One problem with the concepts of risk and crisis is that they are rather vague terms, which can become problematic if they are used too broadly or without reflection. Already more than 50 years ago, Charles F. Hermann (1963) noted that crises are characterized by threats, surprise and quick response times. The challenge with crises is that we tend to be really surprised when they occur, and our typical explanatory models don’t work in the situation (Carroll, 2015). Although there is no commonly accepted definition of an organizational crisis, Lerbinger’s classic definition is considered commonplace. According to Lerbringer (1997, p. 4), an organizational crisis is “an event that brings, or has the potential for bringing, an organization into disrepute and imperils its future profitability, growth, and possibly its very survival.”

In other words, an organizational crisis is a situation in which an organization is unable to continue with its normal operations. It is a common notion that a crisis is recognizable by the fact that it comes as a surprise, and that it comes without any warning signs; a crisis usually seems unimaginable at the time it occurs, but is still a predictable event (Heath & Millar, 2004). The American organizational psychologist Karl E. Weick (1988) describes a crisis as a low-probability situation with major consequences that threaten the most important and fundamental goals of an organization. A crisis often occurs unexpectedly, at an unlikely time. Crises can also be said to be threatening and to create an uncertain situation that requires a quick response time (Lerbringer, 2012). Crises thus threaten the normal order and create a great deal of insecurity in the organization, which must be managed (Falkheimer & Heide, 2010).

There are a number of different definitions for the word crises, but the one that we feel falls best in line with our view of crises comes from the crisis communications researchers Ulmer, Sellnow and Seeger (see the following box).

Definition of crisis

An organizational crisis is a specific, unexpected and nonroutine event or series of events that create high levels of uncertainty and threaten or are perceived to threaten an organization’s high-priority goals.

– Ulmer, Sellnow, and Seeger (2007, p. 7)

Organizational crises often injure or endanger a stakeholder group, and thus can deteriorate the relationship with these stakeholders. Furthermore, a common consequence of organizational crises is that the legitimacy of the organization and the confidence that various stakeholders have in that organization is severely damaged. Modern research literature emphasizes that crises are perceptions of events rather than the events themselves, which means that what is perceived to be a crisis differs from person to person. Consequentially, there are many different perceptions of what constitutes a crisis for an organization. In many cases, management, co-workers, journalists, politicians, consumers and suppliers all have different views about when and why an organizational crisis occurs.

W. Timothy Coombs (2019), one of the world’s leading crisis communications researchers, emphasizes that stakeholders’ perceptions determine whether or not a situation is an organizational crisis.

If people perceive there to be an organizational crisis, then there is a crisis, and people will respond to the organization as if it were in a crisis.

– Coombs (2019, p. 3)

This implies that if co-workers perceive there to be an organizational crisis, then a smart management team would take this into consideration and act appropriately to a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the authors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Crises and communication
• 2 Perspectives on crises and crisis communication
• 3 Internal crisis communication
• 4 Leaders and co-workers – perspectives and roles
• 5 Anticipation – the art of looking for weak signals
• 6 Resilience – the art of managing crises and learning
• 7 What can we learn, and how?
• 8 A note on methodology
• References
• Index