Building organizational resilience through strategic internal communication and organization–employee relationships

ABSTRACT

This study explores the impacts of internal strategic communication and relationship management with employees for organizational resilience in effective internal crisis communication, thereby filling a gap in crisis communication research. Specifically, it provides empirical evidence for how organizational resilience in a crisis can be achieved through strategic internal communication and relationship building with employees. A nationwide survey (N = 830) was conducted among full-time employees in the United States. The results revealed the important mediating role of organization–employee relationships (OER) between resilience and its antecedent, demonstrating that OER is a strong underlying factor in understanding how two-way symmetrical communication indirectly impacts organizational resilience. Thus, this study extends the scope of current crisis communication theories to emphasize managerial efforts directed at organizational resilience. Practical insights for developing organizational resilience include managers investing in two-way symmetrical communication and positive employee relationships before a crisis occurs.

KEYWORDS:

• Internal crisis communication
• two-way symmetrical communication
• organization–employee relationships
• organizational resilience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term resilience in this study refers not only to the process or phenomenon of positive adjustment despite adversity, but also is distinguished from psychological resilience, meaning a trait or dispositional capacity, which has been described as resiliency in the literature (King et al., 2016).

2 This definition is not limited to outcome-centered perspectives focusing on bouncing back but rather entails the integral, capability-based notion of organizational resilience that ‘opens up a wide range of opportunities to achieve a new normal’ by responding to ongoing changes during and after a crisis (Darkow, 2019, p. 151).

3 Resilience scholars have commonly suggested multidimensional concepts for organizational resilience (e.g. Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011). However, no agreement has been reached for the conceptualization of organizational resilience regarding its dimensions and measurements in literature (Bouaziz & Smaoui Hachicha, 2018).

4 This study takes Maitlis and Christianson’s (2014) integrated approach to the sensemaking concept that people who belong to an organization will respond to events by taking cues from their environment and using those to interpret a situation and take action with respect to it.

5 Since a larger number of employees are more likely to attentively manage internal communication than a smaller number of employees, larger organizations with more than 250 employees were chosen (Park et al., 2014). Also, internal communication practices are less salient in small organizations (i.e. employee number < 250) as they have different organizational dynamics compared to large organizations (Men, 2014).